Londoners and bats, I think

I like the ones that carry off and bury dead ants. I saw a video where someone wiped the compound they release when they die on one's back and little guy was like "well guess I'm dead" and waited till he got carted off and thrown in the pit. Eventually it dissipated and he got back to work.

thank you ants. thants.

You have the right idea but I gotta share my ant brainrot for a moment

Queens indeed do not rule nests and they are essentially the brood slave of a colony at worst, the colony's sex-having consolidated into an individual at best. But Queens do make some big ass decisions when it comes to starting a colony, since they are the ones who, after mating (usually out in the open in a nuptial flight event), make the decision of where to dig the first tunnels of a new nest. They also care for the first generations very closely, even helping them out of their eggs and stuff, it rules.

Its probably worth mentioning though that this isn't true across all ant species, since there's a ton of variety. Some ants do no have morphologically distinct queens, as they are selected from among the workers in little ceremonies that scientists once though were dominance duels but now they think might be little cheerleading competitions to see who gets the crowd going best (awesome). Other ants don't have queens at all and are parthenogenic, which has crazy consequences for the dispersal patterns of their offspring. And then you have the supercolonies with multiple queens which are worth their own effortpost

did the ants domesticate the fungus, or did the fungus domesticate the ants?

The "hive mind" trope sucks ass, seriously, it misses so badly. It's always some kind of "one mind, many bodies" thing even though that's just a body, like the one your cells and neurons make up. The hive mind is, if anything, only possible when there are many individuals whose ability to independently gather and digest information in the group. It's emergent from the shared dependencies of social animals. The most direct example is often ants because they can't even survive without others to regulate their bodily processes, like they can't poop right and die if there aren't any other ants to barf food into in order to empty their second stomach. Their "hive mind" is something they make as a collection of individuals, just like with humans tbh (but that's just philosophy in the end aince it's hard to empirically test)