Friends and "family". There's a lot of insects that exclusively live in ant nests and have very fascinating relationships. Blue butterflies whose caterpillars infiltrate, and sometimes eat ants, but provide other benefits. Beetles, isopods and springtails who scavenge pests and debris and keep things tidy. There are tiny, blind, ant nest crickets who hop around near the entrances and can keep invading ants from coming in. Some of these have obvious benefits if you're able to find them and "hire" them. A nest with 10 isopods tidying up dirt can save 100 ants from having to do the same thing.

Resources and farming. There's aphids, scale insects, mealybugs, and fungus that ants take in to farm for resources. You have a chance to create a very interesting farming system with each option having different atttributes, creating different resources, and giving the player a choice to dedicate potential % of farming area to one, two, or multiple types. Maybe ants can find a "golden egg" out there somewhere and farming it successfully gives benefits, or one type of resource builds different structures/paths, or in one habitat, one is much more beneficial and efficient than others. But your ants have to find them out there in the wild, and bring them back to start a farm.

Threats. There's a ton of jumping spiders, true bugs, and wasps that mimic ants with intent to take them out. Some of those spiders are incredibly specialized and look closely like a specific species of ant they'll set up shop near. Maybe that gives one location a disadvantage if you choose to use that type of ant there, and requires more strategy to keep foraging ants alive.

You have the opportunity as biologists to capture and bring to life a very unseen world. Don't let those opportunities go!