'Cut off from it's tribe, it has lost all sense of itself. It is really a part of a body in search of the rest of the body, like the tail of a lizard left twitching upon amputation. An ant colony is really a single organism that is differentiated into various functions, chiefly feeding and breeding, so if one tiny component gets lost like this, if feels some imperative, some compulsion, to rejoin the rest of the the ant-body.'
Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, p.103.
