Headscratchers / Antz

• Exactly how did they choose Bala to be the colony's princess? The queen gave birth every 5 seconds, and everyone was labeled either a worker or a soldier. What separated Bala apart from the other babies? Was she the first born out of billions? Was it because she was the most attractive (as far as ants go)?
  • Ant queens are physically different from the other ants, which can't reproduce.
  • In real life, ants are born the same (and all female apart from the drones) but a few are fed a different diet that makes them become queens. Presumably at some point they decided they needed to cook up a new queen, and Bala was the first larva that was suitable.
• How did General Mandible know about Insectopia? And, if he has been keeping it a secret from the rest of the colony which is very likely, why are ants like Z's 'drunk raving source' allowed to just wander around mentioning it whenever they feel like it?
  • Really, who would believe the words of one 'drunk raving source'? They're, well, drunk and raving. Even Z and Weaver didn't believe him. Z only realised it might be true when he saw the Monolith, and Weaver knew his friend well enough to know he'd go looking for it, whether it existed or not.
• On that note, has old Grebs actually been to Insectopia before, or was he just making it up 'cause he was drunk? After all, he was right about the place's existence, as Z later found out.
  • Considering how accurately he describes it as well as his comment of "I never should-a left", it's probably safe to assume that he was an ant who somehow - either through a "mission" since he's a soldier or just feeling like Z and wanting to explore, found it but then potentially got scared by the freedom and chose to return to the colony and has regretted the decision ever since. In fact, it might even have been him that's responsible for General Mandible knowing about Insectopia in the first place...
• How does General Mandible expect the colony to function without workers? Yeah, he thinks the workers are inferior to soldiers, but in an extremely caste-conscious society like this, the goal of the elite class is to keep the working class in line, not kill them — without the working class, who will serve the elites and do the dirty work the elites don't want to do? How does Mandible plan to construct tunnels, find food, and care for larvae once he's eliminated all the inferior workers who do those things for him and his elite colleagues who, because they're superior, deserve to rule and not do manual labor? A plan to keep rebellious workers in line would make sense; a plan to kill all workers makes no sense.
  • He was planning on rebuilding the colony in his image, so it wouldn't be like a regular ant colony.
  • He actually has kind of a point. When Weaver briefly does tunnel work he is far more productive than the worker caste ants.
  • There are species of ants collectively referred to as Army Ants, who operate in a semi-nomadic style, advancing to an area to hunt for a time and then moving on to another when there's no prey left.
  • He may have been planning to get everything the colony needs by just overpowering other insect colonies and stealing their homes and supplies... possibly even enslaving the other colony to do all of the manual labor for them.
• General Mandible intends to spare Bala from the flood to make her his queen of his colony of soldiers. How does locking her up in his soon-to-be-filled-with-water office spare her from the flood?
  • The only other way out was a window over a vast space. The flood didn't need to completely fill the place to wipe out all the workers.
  • The ant city and the Megatunnel are in two different tunnels, and the Megatunnel is sealed off before the flooding starts.