• A queen ant has certain, easily observed characteristics.ant image by FttSniper from Fotolia.com
  
  The animal kingdom is usually rigidly defined, with certain members in a given group holding a certain rank. A wolf pack will have an alpha male, for instance. The same holds true for insects, and often there is a queen in any given colony. For those interested in locating a queen ant, there are several defining characteristics you can observe.
  
  

Size

• The easiest way to find the queen ant is to look and see which ant is the biggest in the colony. This may take some very careful digging, and some even more careful observation, but the queen ant is always the biggest ant in the colony. This is true across ant species, and it's even true in the varieties of ant that have more than a single queen. Typically the queen is at least double the size of the soldier ants, but she could be even larger in some species, depending on personal characteristics.
  
  

Eggs

• Another telltale sign of the queen ant is that she is the one that lays the eggs. The queen ant is not the only female in the entire ant colony, but she is the only one that lays eggs. It's a good idea to find out what sort of ant colony you're observing if you want to identify the queen, because, as mentioned above, some types of ant colony will boast more than one queen. These colonies will also be much larger because they have multiple egg-laying females. If you can locate the eggs, the queen won't be far behind.
  
  

Nesting

• Since it's the queen ant that lays the eggs, in addition to being the female that helps the workers clean and groom the newly hatched larvae, it's the queen's prerogative to choose the nesting site. The queen ant will actually locate where the nesting site for the colony will be, and from that site, the rest of the colony is slowly built outward by the workers and patrolled by the soldiers. This isn't a readily observable quality of the queen ant, but if you can find her before the nesting site is initially chosen, you will get to watch the full evolution of the ant colony.