The Myth of the Ant Queen

Before reading this essay by Steven Johnson, I always thought of the ant queen as the leader and master of the colony. According to him, she is just pretty much a mom with a TON of children. I remember having ant farms when I was in elementary school, but I never examined them enough to realize that the ants deposit their waste and carcasses as far away from their colony as possible. Humans are different and have cemeteries right in the middle of cities and next to homes and our waste is in landfills outside of cities and towns. I guess ants kind of think of carcasses as waste, too.
Johnson talks about What Engels wrote about a city in England and how this city is separated so that the working class is separated from the middle class. This is difficult to picture because our towns and cities today are not like that. There are areas of towns and cities that are not as prosperous but definitely not "sharply separated". It's interesting that Engels says that the city was thought up in advance, so it could be built with this separtaion. I don't know if I believe that a city could be "thought up" before it exists. I don't think there is a city that a middle class person never runs into a working class citizen. But as Johnson mentioned in the ant farm, the queen is 2 feet below most of the worker ants,never seeing the workers, kind of like this city Engels talks about.
There's no way a person can "plan" a city and its interactions, but our society these days separates itself according to their social status. As you walk down the street in a crowded city, you can clearly see that there is not a lot of interaction between the prosperous and not so prosperous. There is no line dividing the rich from the poor in cities even though these areas are intermixed in cities. Take Bozeman for example, the houses downtown don't necessarily belong to the poor but are not as nice as the ones that exist in the Triple Tree housing development. Even here, there is separation, not because whoever the first settler here decided that was how it was going to be but because of our self-indulged society.
Again, this separation that Johnson and Engels talk about in their essay's comes back to the fact of surface, appearance and status. Even though the queen doesn't run everything in the nest she is looked at as superior, just like a human who is more socially inclined.