Reddit mentions of Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Primers in Complex Systems (1))

When workers accept or reject a queen is fairly complex, and depends on a lot of circumstances, including presence of existing queen(s), pheremonal similarity, possibly environmental or species differences, etc. There's been some study of it lately because of scientific curiosity over how large ant colonies interact and sometimes merge into "supercolonies" that act in a functionally unified way. There seem to be some interspecific (containing multiple ant species) colonies as well, though when that happens isn't fully understood.

One citation to a small piece of the puzzle, summarizing studies on interacting networks of fire-ant colonies:
> [Ken] Ross and others showed that if enough of the ants in a colony, about 15%, have a certain allele, the colony will accept extra queens into the nest. This could be a response to interaction rate. Perhaps the ants respond to the rate at which they meet other ants that have the polygyne allele, b, which seems to affect the odor of the ant that carries it. Perhaps if the rate of interaction with b reaches a certain threshold, possibly leading workers to broaden the range of odors they include in their experience of nestmates, then the workers are more likely to accept a foreign queen.

(That quote from pp. 73-74 of this book).

• Every Thing Must Go: James Ladyman & Don Ross
  
  
• The Philosophy of Complex Systems: Anthology edited by Cliff Hooker
  
  
• Natural Born Cyborgs: Andy Clark
  
  
• Cognitive Surplus: Clay Shirky
  
  
• Quantum Mechanics and Experience and Time & Chance: David Albert
  
  
• Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: Huw Price
  
  
• Science in the Age of Computer Simulation: Eric Winsberg
  
  
• Ant Encounters: Interactions Networks and Colony Behavior: Deborah Gordon
  
  
• The Construction of Social Reality: John Searle
  
  
• Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy: Sandra Mitchell
  
  
• The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction, and Emergence: Robert Batterman
  
  
• Complexity: A Guided Tour: Melanie Mitchell
  
  
• Scientific Metaphysics: Anthology edited James Ladyman
  
  
• Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering: Stephen Strogatz
  
  
• The Ethical Project: Philip Kitcher
  
  
• Foundations of Complex Systems Theories: Sunny Auyang
  
  
• A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming: Paul Edwards
  
  
• "Real Patterns": Dan Dennett (paper)
  
  
• "Why Integrative Pluralism?": Sandra Mitchell (paper)

This one?

This is a good book on the subject

No asking questions! You need to read this and this.