How do ants grow wings?

The queen is born with wings, and so are the males. Workers never have them. When new queens and males are born, they will fly out and mate. The males die soon afterwards, but the queen descends to the ground, digs a hole, bites off her wings and founds a new colony with her offspring, the new workers. She can store the male's sperm, so she can keep laying eggs for years. Fertilized eggs hatch into females, unfertilized ones into males, but this is rare and only happens when queens are born, too. Any female larva can become a queen when given the right amount of food, so in time the workers will arrange the birth of new queens, and the cycle starts again. ^^