You carefully used the touch screen on Hank's phone with your antennae to access your own personal email. You were amazed by how good the phone's reception was, but you also figured that it was a good thing. If you'd remained where good cell service was to be expected, you would have been put in some sort of lab and experimented on. You wouldn't be free, you wouldn't get the opportunity to become the queen that you now were. The Amazon rainforest might be an exile, but you'd be free to live your own life and you had Hank. His comfort for you was clear and you loved it. Becoming a Divine Fire Ant queen might be an odd way of finding true love, but you couldn't complain, and since the specific ant species was different from other ants, bees, and wasps in that the male survived the mating process made it even better.
You and Hank could research what you both were and give the world greater knowledge on the Divine Fire Ant and maybe even work toward a future where your new kind could live and grow alongside humans. The knowledge that Doctor Benjamin had betrayed you to the company that he and Hank worked for more important, but you also knew that there wasn't much that either you or your colony could do about him. Killing Doctor Benjamin, while certainly within the capabilities of your workers, was not what you wanted. Your colony would have to work hard to show him that you weren't a threat to the balance of nature in the Amazon and that your colony could live beside humanity. That would take time to show him that your kind's venom while it may transform vertebrates into giant Divine Fire Ant queens or drones also enlarged invertebrates to the point where they could feed the colony, which you had already given instructions to ensure that Doctor Benjamin would be made aware of that odd and interesting development in the nature of Divine Fire Ant venom. All you could do was to wait for path to be trailed and for Doctor Benjamin to find the beetle that the colony had found earlier.
You flipped through the emails that were in your inbox, and found much of it to be spam, which you quickly deleted. There was nothing from your parents, which was a partial relief for the moment, though you also knew that if they didn't email you, they might have still called your apartment which you didn't have access to now. All you could do is sigh and hope your email would either be the first thing to reach them or would assure them that everything was fine. There was a email from your employer, which the sort of message you expected. It wasn't angry, but definitely wanting to know why you'd failed to show up. You sighed and made a mental note to copy and paste the email that you were going to send to your parents to your employer as well. It wouldn't be an outright lie, as in a way it was true, but it would be leaving out certain details. It would mention that you'd gotten a new job to help Dr. Pym with his research that would pay well, but had been so sudden and with so little time to think it over that you hadn't had time to notify anyone. You figured that once Doctor Benjamin's issues were calmed and your colony was in a position to be better trusted by humanity that you could go into more detail, but for now, the present idea was all that could be done.
Typing was a bit difficult, as your exoskeleton had no sense of touch outside of the fine sensory hairs that protruded from it in places, particularly on your antennae. Those hairs gave you a sense of touch, but they also lacked the size and weight to trigger the phone's touch screen. This made it important to watch the screen and lift your antennae when you saw a response to its movement on the screen. You did, however, manage and a good part of you actually felt quite proud at how well you were getting at the two sensory organs typical of all insects. You typed out your message and then hit the send button and breathed out a sigh of relief, feeling your central thorax hinges stretch and contract to allow you to breathe.
"There," you sighed as you carefully took the cellphone in your mandibles and then "handed" the device back to Hank, "the email is sent and hopefully it'll help."
"If the research company has contacted them... it should help," Hank assured her and rubbed an antenna of his to hers. You felt his love through the contact. "Or it will at least get the conversation started to see where things will stand between you and your family."
"And if things don't go well, you will always have us," Martin said from the other side of her. If Christine could physically still smile, she would have.
She was about to say more when the foraging party returned to the nest. The first worker held a lone large spider in its mandibles. The arachnid had lost one leg and it seemed to struggle in her worker's grip. The worker, though, kept her grip strong enough to prevent the spider's escape but gentle enough that she wasn't crushing the spider in her great mandibles. The worker walked along the ceiling and then down side of the chamber that had been opened up for the start of your nest. The workers that had been moving about in working to build the nest up stepped aside as the foraging party returned.
"We have recovered this tarantula, my queen," the worker at he head of the foraging party reported to you.
"Then let us feed this spider our venom so it may become food for the colony," you said to the worker, "food for MY colony!"
Calling the ants that had transformed you YOUR colony was losing much of the initial oddness to it. It wasn't truly your colony as the adults hadn't hatched from eggs you'd laid, but they were devoted to you and had given you the reward of being their new queen for freeing them from the terrarium that they'd been kept in in the lab. That devotion had grown on you and you had felt yourself coming to care for their well being as much as you did for your own. They loved you and you'd couldn't let them suffer because their original queen had died. In that, they were your colony through different means calling them your colony wasn't odd to you anymore. Again, if you could smile with your mandibles, you would as the workers all cheered.
The other workers from the foraging party then moved into the center of the chamber and moved to smooth out a portion of the chamber's floor. You then watched as they then moved to stand in a semi-circle and with their abdomens pointed toward the area they had smoothed out, even though it meant they had their backs to you. You and your drones watched as they then lifted or depressed their abdomens so that their respective stingers ere manipulated into getting them to release venom. Your antennae easily picked up the scent of the pheromones from the venom and it gave you the urge to sting as well, even though you had no need to. You watched as drops of venom fell from their stingers into the area they smoothed out. At first the soil absorbed the liquid, but eventually a small pool formed. Once that happened, the leading worker from the foraging party then moved to place the spider in the small pool of venom.
You watched as the spider was placed in the pool and the stump of the leg that it had lost was submerged in it. The spider thrashed for awhile. After a few moments, you could see the spider begin to grow in size. The growth was at first rather slow, but it eventually sped up and the spider enlarged as a rapid pace. After a few seconds, the worker was forced to let the spider go as holding it was getting to difficult as it swelled larger and larger. It passed the size of a small dog and was soon half as big as you were. As it grew it's thrashing grew weaker and weaker, as the spider's own exoskeleton limited its own breathing, and the bigger it got, the less oxygen it could get. Your workers stepped back and marveled as the spider grew and once it grew to equal your present size, it's struggles ceased and its legs pulled around it's body. Even in death, the spider continued to swell larger and it didn't stop until the dead spider was twice as big as you were, it's legs brushed against the roof of the chamber. It lead to some crowding, but you knew it would mean that your colony would have food and it wouldn't be stripping the rainforest of all its life for food. The concept of living on bugs didn't even bother you as much as it did because it would allow you to be free, allow your colony to grow, and hopefully make the world better.