Insect reproduction

male bee, wasp or hornet

dominant reproductive female bee in a colony

adult reproducing ant in an ant colony

mating flight of eusocial insects

thumb|Queen (marked) and workers of the Africanised honey bee, Apis mellifera scutellata

reproductively viable female worker ant

mating practice in invertebrates

thumb|upright=1.5|Aphid giving birth by [[parthenogenesis, the live young growing from unfertilized eggs]]

thumb|An ergatoid queen of the species Myrmecia esuriens An ergatoid (from Greek ergat-, "worker" + -oid, "like") is a permanently wingless reproductive adult ant or termite. The similar but somewhat ambiguous term ergatogyne refers to any intermediate form between workers and standard gynes. Ergatoid queens are distinct from other ergatogyne individuals in that they are morphologically consistent within a species and are always capable of mating, whereas inter caste individuals, another class of ergatogynes, often are not. Ergatoids can exhibit wide morphological differences between species,

Alate (Latin ālātus, from āla (“wing”)) is an adjective and noun used in entomology and botany to refer to something that has wings or winglike structures.