If ants could speak, the tunnels of some colonies would echo with cries of, “The queen is dead, long live the queen!” Utterly devoted to their matriarchs, these social insects sometimes go through regime change, when a usurper infiltrates an established ant colony, kills the host queen, and persuades the resident workers to serve her instead. But as scientists report in Current Biology, some of these so-called parasitic queens employ an even more devious strategy, one that seems lifted straight