There were two reasons for this.
1st, workers are in the nest group. Typically, anything reaching the queen will wipe you if you don't have workers set in a no-combat pheromone. With the nature of mole crickets, this is even more punishing if you didn't have a habit of it.
2nd, she did not have enough food to handle the size of her army. In 1.1, much of the game has little to do with the actual combat, but rather a lot more to do with resource management.
I personally go for gradually obtaining 19 ants all at lvl 3, going for the least threatening and most rewarding groups of enemies first and working my way up. If you then also time it so that you're not too far away when a wave of multiple crickets is incoming, you shouldn't have any unexpected losses.
1.2 requires you to work fast anyway, giving you plenty of food to fight against the beefy crickets. You'll probably at most need to take on hard mode strategies, which include rapidly wiping out chambers and having a separate worker team harvest them in the mean-time (recently used this to beat Hard with the challenge active).
