This was a problem Rowan had never considered, a blind spot in his thinking.
Besides never having seen a drone ant before, there was another reason: back then, the Mother Nest hadn't needed all this fuss to produce insect eggs. It could do so directly, without any of that.
Perhaps the Mother Nest knew that if it had needed that step, it wouldn't have grown this large. Rowan would have killed it long ago.
Now that he understood the key issue, he absorbed the drone ants' gene fragments, and the Mother Nest then produced several drone ant eggs.
After some time, the Ant Queen successfully laid eggs.
But all the ants that hatched from these eggs were completely ordinary ants, with no high-tech modifications.
Fortunately, though, these little ones still obeyed Rowan's commands.
And besides being able to recognize pheromones, they were also products of the Mother Nest, so they had both systems for distinguishing friend from foe.
But this was still far from what Rowan had expected.
He wasn't raising ants. If the Swarm couldn't grow stronger along with him, then what was the point of all this collective energy?
After that, Rowan carried out many more experiments.
Although the Mother Nest had originated from the Black Ant's queen's genes, it had later mutated and had long since become unrecognizable.
Rowan extracted some of his own genes and some of the Mother Nest's, then kept trying different combinations. At last, he managed to put together a barely acceptable solution.
The Ant Queens hatched using the new solution had an operating mechanism closer to that of the Mother Nest. They no longer needed drone ants and could lay eggs on their own.
They could also use certain gene combinations to produce specialized insects, such as Excavator Ants and Spy Ants.