There's an excellent series of lectures from Stanford's Robert Sapolsky [1] about Human Behavioral Biology. While not about ants or insects, he brings up various examples from different species to explain the crazy "optimization war" of evolution. It's mind-expanding to learn about the many mechanisms at work - much more than just what can be encoded and passed on with genes.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D