Ants that seem to defy biology – They lay eggs that hatch into another species

This is nuts. If I'm understanding correctly, the M. ibiricus queen mates with a M. structor male, uses his sperm to create sterile, hybrid female worker ants for her colony, then she (astonishingly) can also lay eggs that develop into fertile M. structor males, which means she has removed her genetic material from the egg and effectively cloned the male she previously mated with.

Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. I'm really confused how the female can produce a clone of the male of another species. Wouldn't the other males sperm contain only half the genetic material needed to reproduce? But apparently ant DNA doesn't work that way for sex:

https://press.uni-mainz.de/determining-sex-in-ants/

somehow a male ant has one set of chromosomes while the female ant has two sets of chromosomes. So a male ant sperm must contain enough information to make a complete male? Then when they mate with the female of the other species, the females egg actually gets blanked out so to speak, containing none of the females own genetic material. Then the male sperm fertilizes the egg with one set of chromosomes producing a male offspring that is a clone?

> It was very difficult, because in lab conditions, it’s nearly impossible to have males,” says co-author Jonathan Romiguier, an ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France, to New Scientist’s Tim Vernimmen. “We had something like 50 colonies and monitored them for two years without a single male being born. Then we got lucky.

This confuses me too.

Did the queen once mate with one of these males and save the sperm for two years? Or are the queens somehow born with a copy of the genetic material.

Or does the old queen produce one, which mates with the new queen, and then dies off. And the new queen is able to hold onto that sperm for years (forever?). And they only produce a handful of males for this purpose?

Also why is it so difficult to have males in lab conditions?