A note on ant colony maturity, ants tend to produce alates mostly if they have an abundance of high quality food regardless of size of the colony. While this can happen in captivity for a young colony in the wild a colony usually manages to obtain this threshold once they have a large work force and can stand up to intraspecific and interspecific competition and asserted themselves in their environment. What you would typically assume of a mature colony. And while this can happen early on in a younger colony in captivity the size of the colony would limit the alates reared to a few -far less then the hundreds or thousands a mature colony can produce.
In places that get winter some species rear their alates from overwintered larva (larva from the previous year), others will hibernate the queens and some will just rear it like any other larva during the spring or fall. The time larva are reared do not necessarily coincide with when the ants fly.
Additionally males often outnumber the females and in some species (Not sure how prevalent in ants as a whole) colonies either have a male or female bias. On the other hand some ants call for mates, which is when queens do not fly and instead sit at the nest entrance waiting for a male who is usually attracted by pheromones. Once mated she then flies to start a new colony. Some species can also inbreed with little apparent negative effect.
There are also ants that do not disperse via flight, sometimes they loose their wings all together (usually referred to as ergatoid) or are brachypterous (have tiny nonfunctional wings). A worker that has fully functional reproductive capabilities and otherwise acts and behaves like a queen is referred to as a gamergate. Some ants are also known to produce intercastes (ants that are in between worker and queen). Another oddity is in the case of Cardiocondyla males are wingless and worker like and will kill other males within the nest to stay as the sole mating male.
Edited by LC3, April 21 2018 - 10:01 PM.