I'll look it up in my ant book and tell you tomorrow, but you do get usurpery in ant society. Plus slavery and war and farming and shit.
Basically, invasion goes like this:
- Egg -> Larva -> Pupa -> Ant
- Young queen matures in ant colony.
- Queen goes and has a shag, gets restless.
- Queen takes honour guard and heads for another nearby colony.
- Queen + hench-ants barge past sentries and invade nest.
- Invading queen + cronies make for the nursery chambers.
- Queen grabs some pupae, eggs. Nursery staff mob her, honour guard perish in her defence.
- Queen runs for it.
- Queen finds some secluded corner of the nest and plants pupae/eggs. Fights off any inquisitive patrols.
- Pupae mature, eggs hatch. Despite being a different species and often a different colour, the newborn ants see the invader as their mother and defend her from attackers.
- Now in relative safety, the queen begins to dig a small hole and lay her own eggs.
- When this strike force hatches, she leads them to the chamber of the true queen (i.e. the one who actually lives in this colony).
- Slaughter ensues.
- As the confuson builds, ants may attack their own side. In any event, the immobile home queen is quickly killled, often by her own children.
- The invading queen, who has been hiding out of the way throughout the carnage, plonks herself down in the old queen's hole and proceeds to start laying eggs.
- Invading queen is unquestioningly accepted as the new matriarch and is waited on for the rest of her life.