"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler..." – Proverbs 6:6–7
*From the primer read to every newly emerged worker in the Chrysalis Cloisters, with the nurse's own remarks in brackets.* You are a daughter of the galleries. You were weighed this morning. The ratio on your harness is your name until you earn another. Here is what you are, and what the others are, so that you do not mistake them. **Size, first.** Every daughter of the galleries is large enough to look an elephant calf in the eye. A minim measures a little under a metre from mandible to gaster, a media a little over one, a major nearly two; raised on her hind legs, a major can lay her antennae on an elephant's flank. [There is nothing smaller than a minim in Myrmecopolis. The ants of other worlds, the ones that fit on a leaf, are a story the nurses tell to make larvae laugh.] **Minims** are the smallest of us. They tend the fungus gardens in the deep galleries, chew leaf into mulch, nurse the brood and keep the air of the nurseries clean. They are the ones the city cannot do withou...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.