Colony in sentence

303 examples of Colony in a sentence

It feels like I've landed in a colony of angels."

David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, and the title essay in this collection is about his trip to a nudist colony.

This is the nest of the mature colony, and there's the nest entrance.

And every colony has a name, which is a number, which is painted on a rock.

And because of that, I've been able to study how their behavior changes as the colony gets older and larger.

So I want to tell you about the life cycle of a colony.

So this is the colony founded by a queen the previous summer.

This is a three-year-old colony.

This is a five-year-old colony.

So it starts out with zero ants, just the founding queen, and it grows to a size of about 10 or 12 thousand ants when the colony is five.

And I know how colony size changes as a function of colony age because I've dug up colonies of known age and counted all the ants.

That's not just how is the colony organized, but how does it change what it's doing?

How is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task as conditions change?

So, things happen to an ant colony.

So, with nobody telling anybody what to do, how is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task?

So that's only about 25 percent of the colony, and they're the oldest ants.

And when we dig up nests we find they're about as deep as the colony is wide, so about a meter deep for the big old nests.

I don't think that chamber has evolved because of me and my backhoe and my crew of students with pickaxes, but instead because when there's flooding, occasionally the colony has to go down deep.

And curiously, and interestingly, it looks as though at any time about half the ants in the colony are just doing nothing.

And if you mark ants that are working outside, and dig up a colony, you never see them deep down.

So that's one way that we know the queen isn't directing the behavior of the colony.

This process changes with colony age, and it changes like this.

So, the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony.

Instead, something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older.

And it would change as the colony gets larger.

So the one thing, though, that I want you to remember about this is that these patterns of interactions are something that you'd expect to be closely connected to colony size.

But in a small colony, it's likely to meet fewer foragers, just because there are fewer other foragers there to meet.

So this is the kind of rule that, as the colony develops and gets older and larger, will produce different behavior in an old colony and a small young one.

This is called colony collapse disorder, and it's bizarre.

And colony collapse disorder is not the only thing affecting honeybees.

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