[bee_rider]

I think the “letting others do the hard work” makes it easy to interpret your comment as somehow very negative.

The reproductive success of an ant hill is determined at the hill level, so the ants have no evolutionary incentive for selfishness at all.

[justinjlynn]

Individual ants in a colony can be understood as cells of a multicellular organism operating at a higher level of independence. It's a fascinating adaptation and one wonders what "selfishness" would even mean in such a context. Do ants have memetic behavioural evolution or are their reactions to environmental stimuli purely genetically determined? It's actually quite a fascinating question with a number of implications and avenues for exploration.