As someone who was born in the crappy part of communist Yugoslavia, I can confirm: slowly starving to death in a dark, abandoned nuclear bunker is an apt metaphor.
As others have pointed out there isn't really a social hierarchy among ants. Their a mostly decentralized autonomous colonies. The only real hierarchy is who gets to walk on top of others in a tunnel, which it usually the workers going back outside walking over the younger ones who aren't old enough to leave yet.
Well the queen isn't really the top of the hierarchy as she would be in a human colony. She's simply one who has a particular job (reproduction) and thus greater needs. Not really any different from any of the other ants.
I think that this is a bold statement unless you dig the colony and search for a queen. The same hole collecting ants could collect easily young queens. Nothing prevents the area to be colonised by winged queens origined in the other colony. Not even bats, the surface colony should have a swarm each year.
On the other part, the absence of spiders is much more interesting. Would point to that spiders can't live with a pure diet of ants. Formic acid probably.
