ON THE COMPLEX TOPIC OF ANT GENDER
When I was a little girl everything was "he" --but, bugs especially were "he" until proven otherwise. This is why I always push back when I suspect someone is defaulting to male pronouns or gender for hymenopterans.
When it comes to bees and ants every single one is better described as "she" (until proven otherwise.)
All worker ants/bees are female. This is 99.5 percent of all ants and bees you'll see. Easy.
Males are produced for mating flights only and in ants males often have wings. In bees males are large and round with big eyes, though not as big as queens.
Since most ants and bees you will see in the wild tend to be workers they are all generally female. So, if an ant took some of your cupcake. "She's trying to take my cupcake." makes more sense than "He's trying to take my cupcake." (Let her have it. She deserved it.) Male bees and ants do not forage or help build nests, they fly, they mate, then they die.
But, it's not always so cut and dry. Sometimes an ant will be born as gynandromorph... which means they are literally split down the middle half male/ half female. Nature is complex. It's more fun when don't just paste human patterns and expectations on to nature without thinking about I think.
This isn't *that* important as ants don't even have a concept of gender like the human concept of gender, but naturally if you are dealing with fictional eg. "ant people" you have some thinking to do.
Most popular children's books and movies choose to make the worker ants a mix of male and female. Sometimes even all male. In some books they insist all the solider ants are male and the females only work in the nursery. BORING. And then they *always* make a male ant the protagonist. Who would want to watch a movie about bugs where every character is female? Only little boys like bugs. Duh.
This same media will choose to make the queen their "ruler" ... because that's how human queens work, some will even add a king ant... which is just... I don't even know what to say. The queen mated with like ten or fifteen males years ago and they are all dead. That's more interesting!
Queen ants are not rulers, they are very special, but ant colonies are run by the workers, they oldest and most active and experienced workers make the big choices and have the most influence.
