Ants Trivia
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48 free Ants trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ants farm fungus, stitch wounds, build supercolonies that span continents and snap their jaws shut at 230 km/h. A single queen can live thirty years; a crushed worker can trigger a riot with one chemical signal. This trivia about ants covers anatomy, colony life, famous species from leafcutters to bullet ants, and the people who made them a science. Every answer is sourced and explained, so the quiz works for classrooms, bug lovers and pub nights alike.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ants belong to the same insect order as which of these?
Wasps
Wasps share the order Hymenoptera with ants and bees, and ants evolved from wasp-like ancestors. The furry insects known as velvet ants are not ants at all but wingless female wasps.
Q 02A 2022 study estimated that roughly how many ants are alive on Earth?
20 quadrillion
20 quadrillion, which works out at about 2.5 million ants for every person alive. Together they are thought to outweigh all the world's wild birds and mammals combined.
Q 03Which US state is believed to have had no ants at all until people brought them?
Hawaii
Hawaii lies so far from any continent that ants never reached it on their own. Every one of the dozens of species living there today arrived with people.
Q 04The original West Germanic meaning of the word ant was what?
The biter
The biter, or strictly 'the biter-off', from Germanic roots meaning 'off' and 'cut'. Another old English name for the insect, pismire, is said to come from the urine-like smell of an anthill.
Q 05The scientific study of ants is called what?
Myrmecology
Myrmecology takes its name from myrmex, the Greek for ant. Its most famous figure, E. O. Wilson, worked out how ants recognise their dead and carry them out of the nest.
Q 06Entomologists use the formal term gyne for which member of an ant colony?
A queen
A queen is a gyne, from the Greek for woman, the root of gynaecology. She mates during one brief spell early in life, stores the sperm, and never needs to mate again.
Q 07Which members of an ant colony usually die within weeks, soon after mating?
Males
Males exist only to mate and die soon afterwards. A queen that mates with them can live for nearly 30 years, about 100 times longer than a solitary insect of her size.
Q 08Which insects do many ants herd, guard and 'milk' for sugary honeydew?
Aphids
Aphids release drops of honeydew when an ant strokes them with its antennae. In return the ants drive off predators and even carry their herd to fresh plants.
Q 09Which members of an ant colony have wings?
Only queens and males
Only queens and males grow wings, which carry them on a single mating flight. A queen then sheds hers, and the stubs left behind are one way to tell her from a worker.
Q 10What does a fertilised ant egg normally develop into?
A female
A female: every fertilised egg becomes a daughter, whether worker or queen. Males hatch from eggs that were never fertilised, so a male ant has a mother but no father.
Q 11Fossils in amber show that ants first appeared during the age of which animals?
Dinosaurs
Dinosaurs: the first proof was a pair of worker ants sealed in Cretaceous amber, picked up in New Jersey in 1966 by a rock-collecting couple named Frey, whose name the species now carries.
Q 12Termites are sometimes called white ants, but they are actually related to which insects?
Cockroaches
Cockroaches: DNA studies show that termites are in effect social cockroaches, so their ant-like colonies evolved quite separately from those of real ants.
Q 13What does a crushed ant release that sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy?
An alarm pheromone
Q 21In parts of Africa and South America, large ants are used in medicine as substitutes for what?
Surgical sutures
Surgical sutures: the ant is held so that it bites across the cut, pulling the edges together, and its body is then twisted off to leave the locked jaws behind as a stitch.
Q 22Which book of the Bible tells the lazy to 'go to the ant' and 'consider her ways'?
Proverbs
Proverbs holds up the ant as a model because she lays in food all summer with no overseer or ruler to make her. The Quran, too, names one of its chapters The Ant.
Q 23The red imported fire ant reached the US through Mobile, Alabama, from which region?
South America
An alarm pheromone, a scent that also draws in ants from farther away. Some slave-raiding ants turn the trick around, spraying a false alarm that scatters the defenders of the nest they are robbing.
Q 14Leafcutter ants carry leaves home in order to do what with them?
Farm fungus
Farm fungus: the ants chew the leaves into a mulch that feeds an underground garden, and it is the fungus growing on it, not the leaf, that the colony's young are raised on.
Q 15A leafcutter ant can carry roughly how many times its own body weight?
50 times
50 times its own weight. The colony's tiniest workers often ride on the leaf being carried, guarding the carrier against flies that try to lay their eggs on it.
Q 16The 'zombie-ant' fungus, which takes over an ant's body, inspired the infection in which game and TV series?
The Last of Us
The Last of Us imagines the fungus jumping to humans. In real life it drives a dying ant to lock its jaws onto a plant, then grows a stalk from the ant's head to scatter spores.
Q 17Which acid, sprayed by many ants in defence, takes its name from the Latin word for ant?
Formic acid
Formic acid comes from formica, the Latin for ant, because early chemists first obtained it by distilling ants. Wood ants still squirt it at anything that threatens the nest.
Q 18Army ants rest in a temporary 'bivouac' made of what?
Their own bodies
Their own bodies: the workers link legs and cling together into a living nest, which breaks up when the colony marches on and forms again at the next stop.
Q 19Army ants cut off from their column can end up marching in which shape until they die of exhaustion?
A circle
A circle, known as an ant mill or death spiral, forms because each ant simply follows the one in front. The naturalist William Beebe described one in 1921 so big that a lap took two and a half hours.
Q 20Siafu, the name for African driver ants, is a loanword from which language?
Swahili
Swahili lent English the word siafu. Their marching columns attack whatever lies in the way, snakes, birds and mammals included, and can strip a trapped animal bare.
South America: the ants came ashore from a cargo ship in the 1930s or 1940s and have since spread right across the southern United States.
Q 24Which Surrealist painter used swarming ants as a recurring symbol of death and decay?
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí, who had a well-known fear of insects, set ants crawling over a pocket watch in The Persistence of Memory, his painting of melting clocks.
Q 25The Satere-Mawe people of Brazil weave bullet ants into what for warrior initiation rites?
Gloves
Gloves: the ants are sedated, woven in with their stingers pointing inward and left to wake before a boy slides his hands inside. The Sateré-Mawé call the rite 'sticking the hand into the glove'.
Q 26Weaver ants build their nests by binding leaves together using what?
Larval silk
Larval silk: adult weaver ants cannot spin, so a worker grips one of the colony's grubs in its jaws and passes it back and forth across a seam like a tube of glue.
Q 27Introduced Argentine ant colonies on separate continents have been shown to form what?
A single global supercolony
A single global supercolony: ants brought together from California, Europe and Japan treat one another as nestmates instead of fighting, probably because they all descend from one ancestral colony.
Q 28What do carpenter ants do with the wood they chew out of timber?
Dump it as sawdust
Dump it as sawdust: unlike termites, carpenter ants cannot live on wood and only hollow it out for living space, so little piles of shavings are the giveaway of a nest.
Q 29Which ants hang workers from the nest ceiling as living larders?
Honeypot ants
Honeypot ants: the workers, called repletes, are fed until they swell to many times their normal size. In lean times a hungry nestmate prods a replete and it brings up some of the stored food.
Q 30Besides catching prey, trap-jaw ants use their jaw strike to do what?
Fling themselves clear
Fling themselves clear: an ant that fires its jaws against the ground is thrown into the air like a pilot in an ejector seat, and the same strike can bounce an intruder away.