Nuptial flight

A mature ant colony seasonally produces winged virgin queens and males, called alates.

Within a few days after they have emerged (eclosed) from the pupa case, males are "quickly converted into single-purpose sexual missiles.

Different colonies of the same species often use environmental cues to synchronize the release of males and queens so that they can mate with individuals from other nests, thus reducing inbreeding.

From this point the queen continuously lays eggs which hatch into larvae, exclusively destined to develop into worker ants.

Assuming that the total number of ant colonies in the area remains constant, on average only one of these queens succeeds.

The rest are destroyed by predators (most notably other ants), environmental hazards or failures in raising the first brood at various stages of the process.

This process greatly increases the success rate of virgin queens and allows the creation of extremely large supercolonies.

"Flying ant day" is an informal term for the day on which future queen ants emerge from the nest to begin their nuptial flight,[6] although citizen science based research has demonstrated that nuptials flights are not particularly spatially or temporally synchronised.

[7][8] However, the number of ants flying on certain days can be large enough to be detected by weather service radar systems, resembling rain showers.

The queens fly around – some covering very long distances, others only a few meters – then mate and drop to the ground, where they lose their wings and attempt to start a new ant colony.

[citation needed] The mass of flying insects often attracts the attention of predators such as birds, and it is common to see flocks gorging on the readily available food.