Nice, jwb!
I don't have time for a lengthy reply atm, but I will comment quickly. I believe the way we talk about ants may be misleading. We call the reproducing females queens which indicate they are rulers. I think that's misleading. Flipping it, one might say the reproductive females are like handmaidens from The Handmaid's Tale. That would be misleading too, but perhaps slightly closer to a truth.
Most biologists would generally say that an anthill is comprised of selfish individuals that cooperate in a way so that everyone benefits. Or even more accurately, a group of cooperating selfish genes that use ants as their vehicles to take them into the future. This is generally what you would expect to emerge from natural selection.
Where that is not readily apparent and animals seem to act in an altruistic manner, there generally are interesting explanations why that is, such as the aforementioned haplodiploidi. A gene that increases the fitness of other genes at the expense of its own fitness will get weeded out over time by natural selection. Hence, altruism, while it may appear for various reasons, is not stable, but selfishness is. For general evolutionary theory, that should be the basic expectation. What looks like altruism tends to be either selfishness in disguise, a misplaced gamble or a selfish strategy in a situation which it is no longer ideally adapted to, making it altruistic and unstable.
For ants, science seem to say their ancestors were monogamous and this (along with haplodiploidity and a few other factors) would promote evolution into eusociality. When polygamy arises as a later characteristic, it can mean that eusociality is no longer stable and that these colonies are in fact being invaded and disrupted by selfish, exploitative strategies as we speak. This is quite common and I'll write a little more about that in another post, I think.
I haven't seen the documentary you've seen, but I do believe that if it is about eusociality/cooperation, then the story it tells may possibly be a little skewed and not tell the full picture.
I would be grateful if perhaps Marie or another mod could move my posts over from the Stupidest questions thread
