Does vacuum kill ants

Answer 1

In my research for this question I found this article discussing insect mortality in rough (50mbar) vacuum:

http://www.bioone.org/bioone/?request=get-abstract&issn=0022-0493&volume=096&issue=04&page=1100

It cites some other articles that go deeper into the matter.

This is what I learned from the article and from anecdotes by coworkers (I work in a physics lab - we often need to evacuate stuff and sometimes insects have crawled into our experiments):

Most insects do not survive for long in vacuum. For higher temperatures they survive for shorter periods (I would guess this is because of a higher metabolism rate at a higher temperature). They do not explode or anything, but rather just die. If you expose them to a vacuum for under a minute, they may still live.
I have not found anything specific to ants, but my best guess is that they would die after spending a minute in vacuum.

However, there are some insects that survive vacuum because they can go into a sort of "hibernation state":

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/09/09/tardigrade-space.html

I do not know the effect of vacuum on ant eggs. My guess is that they survive longer in a vacuum than adult ants.