# What happens to ants or bees who don't do any work?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [September 11, 2021, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502 "2021-09-11T05:47:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2021, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/1 "2021-09-11T05:47:54Z")
This question is, obviously, a human projecting his human attitudes and thoughts onto non-human insects. But if a worker bee or worker ant just sat there and did nothing, lazing and getting fat off the labor of others, how would his fellow insects deal with it, and would they even care?
Obviously, work is deeply embedded into their instinct; they have no ability to even contemplate being different. But what if?
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### Author:  [@Enjoy\_Slurm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enjoy_Slurm)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2021, 6:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/2 "2021-09-11T06:51:12Z")
This was the second link on google for me.
“Ultimately, the question of why colonies would produce so many inactive workers, in spite of potentially high production and maintenance costs, is still very much a mystery,” the scientists write
> **[Study Shows Some Worker Ants Don’t Work At All](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/66789/study-shows-some-worker-ants-dont-work-all)**
>
> A research team has taken the famously industrious ant down a peg, showing that many ants don’t do their fair share of work—or any work at all.
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### Author:  [@DCnDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DCnDC)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2021, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/3 "2021-09-11T12:57:03Z")
Complete WAG but I’ve noticed when putting down any baits they’ll swarm the thing. It will be literally covered in ants, who will all take the poison back to the colony. Maybe those non-working individuals are a kind of safety net against poison?
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### Author:  [@Enjoy\_Slurm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enjoy_Slurm)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2021, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/4 "2021-09-11T15:12:11Z")
Something similar was proposed in the article I linked to.
> [@](#):
>
> Another possibility is that the lazy ants are “behaviorally idle” but not “functionally idle,” and have jobs that don’t require much movement or look like work, such as acting as live feeding stations and regurgitating food for other ants when needed, or relaying chemical messages around the nest.
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### Author:  [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2021, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/5 "2021-09-11T16:08:16Z")
They may also be ‘reserve’ ants kept in case of large food source discoveries, or for emergencies like flooding. Natural complex systems often have redundancies like this built into them.
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### Author:  [@Enjoy\_Slurm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enjoy_Slurm)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2021, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/6 "2021-09-11T21:48:38Z")
That was also mentioned in the article I linked to and showed that that was not the case.
> [@](#):
>
> They might also be a kind of reserve work force that springs into action when other workers die or the workload in the colony suddenly increases, though other studies testing that idea with different insects found little support for it and showed that when more labor is needed, the ants that are already working just work harder and increase their activity.
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### Author:  [@Capn\_Carl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capn_Carl)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2021, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/7 "2021-09-11T21:54:58Z")
If you watch a nest of harvester ants, many of them appear idle. But if you disturb a few with a gentle tap, they _all_ go berserk, jaws open and held up, seeking revenge.
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### Author:  [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2021, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/8 "2021-09-11T22:01:13Z")
I wasn’t thinking about just increased normal workload, but thing like floods, where ants form a ‘raft’ with their bodies and the colony climbs on and floats away. Sucks to be the ones on the bottom, but maybe that’s why an excess of workers is a good thing.
Another possibility is that it’s just not efficient to micro-manage the worker supply, so some colonies just create more than they need. Likewise, when ants follow a pheromone trail, a number of them follow it in the wrong direction. It may be more efficient to allow this to happen than to have some kind of directionality to the trail.
Or, like inflation vs deflation it’s better to have too many ants than too little, so that if a disaster happens to some of them, the others can maintain the food supply to the hive.
Ants don’t ‘think’. They are more like little state machines following simple rules. If a bunch of them are just milling around doing nothing, I would assume that it’s part of the rule set for some reason, and not that some ants are ‘lazy’ or parasites on the hive.
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### Author:  [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2021, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/9 "2021-09-11T22:47:02Z")
I think this is a question best examined through the lens of evolution. Ants and those bees that live in colonies are guided by instinctual behaviors and the worker ants and worker bees are all sterile offspring of the queen and a drone that died after mating.
Workers that don’t contribute anything at all would of course be a drag on a colony, so there are two possible paths for evolution to deal with that. The simplest is that there’s an evolutionary pressure towards the working instincts being universal. Any colony with a significant number of slackers will have increased risk of losing in competition with other colonies or the environment.
Another way for evolution to deal with that would be to have some sort of peer pressure system, but that would require both that some bees/ants evolved an instinct for pestering fellow workers taking a break, and for the “unproductiveness” of those workers to be “broken” in a way where this peer pressure work on them.
Evolution for ants and bees living in colonies almost entirely works on the whole colony system, so it seems very unlikely a complex system of lazy and nagging ants would arise, and an imperfect system with the occasional dud, or functions and inefficiencies we just don’t understand, seem a lot more likely.
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### Author:  [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 10:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/10 "2021-09-12T10:45:35Z")
Maybe those idle ants have just fallen off the nest. (10 kudos for those who get that reference)
Somewhere I read that ants don’t do the same work their entire life. When they’re young, they do work within the colony such as tending eggs or the farm. When they’re older, they go out foraging. My guess is that this age-related division of work is even more specific than that. There may be a dozen or more different jobs that they sequentially take up. And at least one of these jobs doesn’t require much movement by the ant, so it looks like they’re idle. Yes, I know that was suggested in the article, so that’s not new. But if they followed these idle ants long enough, they may find they stop being idle and start doing work.
Ideally, they should mark several newly hatched ants and follow them throughout their life. See if they all follow the same career path.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/11 "2021-09-12T17:28:11Z")
The question is an important one for humans, because a human who doesn’t work and only mooches off the work of others can still breed and pass on their lazy genes. In fact, I’ve seen speculation that a lot of the evolution of our intelligence was driven by an arms race between the productive and parasitic members of society: It benefits the organism to be clever enough to avoid work, and it’s also a benefit to be clever enough to be able to catch the ones who aren’t working.
With the social insects, however, almost none of them are breeding on their own. Since the only way your genes can get passed on is through the queen, the selective pressure is all towards doing what’s good for the queen.
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### Author:  [@Fish\_Cheer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fish_Cheer)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/12 "2021-09-12T18:38:45Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> With the social insects, however, almost none of them are breeding on their own. Since the only way your genes can get passed on is through the queen, the selective pressure is all towards doing what’s good for the queen.
Not for any particular queen, though. Bees are quick to replace queens they’re not happy with, and the offspring of her successor will only share half their genes with the current population.
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### Author:  [@Briny\_Deep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Briny_Deep)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/13 "2021-09-12T19:26:50Z")
They report you to Headquarters for insanity.
> “Hail!”
>
> “What are you doing?”
>
> The boy answered truthfully: “I am not doing anything.”
>
> It was baffled by this for several seconds, as you would be if Einstein had told you his latest ideas about space. Then it extended the twelve joints of its aerial and spoke past him into the blue.
>
> It said: “105978/UDG reporting from square five. There is an insane ant on square five. Over to you.”
-T.H. White, _The Once and Future King_
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### Author:  [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/14 "2021-09-12T21:26:53Z")
> [@dtilque](#):
>
> Somewhere I read that ants don’t do the same work their entire life. When they’re young, they do work within the colony such as tending eggs or the farm. When they’re older, they go out foraging.
I don’t know much about ants but [domestic bees](https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/the-life-of-bees/the-role-of-the-worker-bee) are certainly that way (scroll down a bit to **Roles After Birth** ).
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### Author:  [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/15 "2021-09-12T21:42:17Z")
There are ants that get infected by a tapeworm that changes their appearance and behaviour:
[https://www.projecttopics.org/parasites-as-fountains-of-youth-study-finds-infected-ants-live-much-longer.html](https://www.projecttopics.org/parasites-as-fountains-of-youth-study-finds-infected-ants-live-much-longer.html)
They live longer, and they work less:
> The infected ants are easily distinguished from their brown nest-mates due to their lighter, yellow color, an effect that results from their cuticle being less pigmented. They are also less active and receive enhanced care from other workers in the nest. “The infected insects get more attention and are fed, cleaned, and looked after better. They even benefit from slightly more care than the nest’s queen,” explained Professor Susanne Foitzik.
> […]
> “The infected insects live a life of luxury, but the fact that they receive more social care cannot alone account for their prolonged lifespan,” concluded Foitzik.
I am so happy that I found this article again: I had read this some time ago, the OPs question reminded me of it and Google helped! 😃
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### Author:  [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/16 "2021-09-12T21:48:49Z")
They get their welfare benefits cut.
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### Author:  [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/17 "2021-09-12T21:51:43Z")
They get watched.
[ ](https://blog.odd-e.com/yilv/Seeing%20system%20dynamics%20in%20organizational%20change%20-%204.1.jpg)
[click to enlarge]
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### Author:  [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/18 "2021-09-12T22:21:49Z")
Those infected ants are really awsome:
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202118](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202118)
> **[Parasites as fountains of youth: Study finds infected ants live much longer -...](https://www.innovations-report.com/studies-and-analyses/parasites-as-fountains-of-youth-study-finds-infected-ants-live-much-longer/)**
>
> Life expectancy of tapeworm-infected worker ants is significantly higher than that of their uninfected nest-mates and resembles that of ant queens. Ant workers that are infected with a tapeworm live...
> **[Parasite grants ants "eternal youth" – but there's a dark side](https://newatlas.com/science/ant-parasite-anti-aging/)**
>
> Eternal youth is the first thing many of us might wish for if we stumbled onto a genie or a magic monkey’s paw, but there’s always a catch. Now, scientists have discovered a version of this story playing out in ant nests, as parasites drastically...
> And that’s where the dark downside creeps in. It seems like a pretty sweet gig for the individual infected insects, but the colonies as a whole began to suffer. Uninfected ants appeared to be more stressed out and were dying younger than they might have if the parasites didn’t show up at all.\>
> There’s also the question of what’s in it for the worms themselves, and the team found that the parasites are playing the long game by keeping the infected ants coddled and lazy. It’s only a matter of time before a woodpecker comes knocking on the nest, and while healthy ants will scatter, the infected ones just sit there and await their fate.
>
> The endgame is that these worms reproduce inside the woodpecker’s gut. The birds poop out the tapeworm eggs, where ant foragers will stumble onto them and feed them to their young in the nest, starting the cycle over anew.
So yes, indeed, as was observed before, this only makes sense from the perspective of evolution. Of the tapeworm, in this case.
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### Author:  [@Dallas\_Jones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dallas_Jones)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2021, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/19 "2021-09-12T23:34:30Z")
# [What happens to ants or bees who don’t do any work?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502)
They get fast tracked to middle management, unless they are related to someone who is already in management, then they may go directly to administration.
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### Author:  [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2021, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happens-to-ants-or-bees-who-dont-do-any-work/950502/20 "2021-09-13T03:04:09Z")
> [@naita](#):
>
> and an imperfect system with the occasional dud, or functions and inefficiencies we just don’t understand, seem a lot more likely.
Yeah. Any evolutionary development doesn’t have to be optimal, or even an objective improvement: it just has to be sufficiently non-damaging to permit individuals to reproduce successfully enough for the population to survive.
Even if these “non-working” ants are a net drain on the ant community’s resources, as long as the community is successful overall there won’t necessarily be significant evolutionary pressure against them.
As you and Sam point out, any kind of “disciplinary” or “penal” system for non-working ants would require a lot of energy devoted to maintaining it. It may just be more efficient for ant colonies to tolerate large subsets of their population living off colony resources without contributing anything to them than to put in the work to increase labor force participation.
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