Distribution:  Worldwide in tropical and subtropical regions.

Habitat:  Found in varied habitats, in trees or soil.

Food and Feeding Methods:  All termites feed on dead or living vegetable matter.  Wood-eating termites generally have large numbers of intestinal protozoa and bacteria to help them digest cellulose but the Termitidae are peculiar in having hardly any of these micro-organisms in their digestive tracts.  The Termitidae workers pass on partially digested food--humus and decaying or sound wood--to any of their companions who may be hungry.  The worker transfers the food from either end of its body, either regurgitating some food from its mouth or presenting excrement from its tail.  The food passes through the alimentary canal of several individuals until all the nourishment is extracted from it and nothing is left but an indigestible dark-brown paste that is used as cement for building the mound. Consequently there is no sewage problem in the crowded home and even corpses of dead termites and cast skins of hatchlings are devoured, keeping the inside of the nest spotlessly clean.

Termites obtain their water supply mainly from the damp food that they collect after rain.  In addition, the air inside the mound is saturated with vapor from the bodies of the insects themselves.

Behavior:  Termites are low on the evolutionary scale of insect life but have evolved a complex and efficient social life, with hundreds of thousands of individuals living in close, interdependent association in colonies that are run on absolute totalitarian lines.  There are still many questions about how discipline is maintained in the crowded, complex nests of termites and how everything is regulated with precision with  no clear authority to oversee it since all individuals appear to be on a footing of complete equality.

The Termitidae family has a more complex, rigid caste system than other ‘lower’ termites and is made up of 4 different castes: primary reproductives , secondary reproductives, soldiers and workers. 

The majority of the inhabitants in a termite colony are workers, both males and females who are stunted in growth, blind and sterile.  The whole colony is dependent on the workers for they do nearly all the work.  Workers gather food, repair damage to the mound and care for the eggs.  In their search for food, workers excavate tunnels from the mound, radiating in all directions.  Once they’ve exhausted the supply of humus, decaying and sound wood, they leave the old tunnels to cave in and dig new tunnels in other directions. 
Workers are active 24 hours a day as there is no distinction between day and night in the darkness of their surroundings.  Activities do slow down during the rains when there is no breeding and little food gathering, and the termites spend most of their time doing nothing.  Workers live for about 4 or 5 years.

Soldiers, like workers, are males and females that have failed to develop fully.  They are sterile and unable to feed themselves, depending on the workers for food.  Their job is to defend the colony, particularly against ants.  They have huge jaws and a swollen head in which is lodged a gland that produces a sticky, irritant fluid.  As the soldier bites, it grips like a bulldog and won’t let go, giving off a fine stream of the irritant fluid.  If the fluid gets on an ant, it causes it to curl up and even die.  Like workers, the soldiers are blind, and detect friend or foe by touch and smell.  A few soldiers always accompany workers when they are foraging for food but take no part in the food gathering.  If the mound is broken, they will come running out, jaws wide open and antennae waving, ready to fight to the death to defend the colony.  Soldiers make up only about 5% of the colony.

The king and queen of the termite colony do not rule but are simply the parents of the teeming horde and are called ‘primary reproductives’.  Normally there is only 1 pair of reproductives and they are the founder of the colony, known as the primary king and queen. 

The king does not increase in size after casting his wings and is much smaller than his mate.  His only function is to mate with the queen from time to time so that she maintains a regular supply of fertile eggs.  The king is a timid creature, hiding under the abdomen of the queen if the nest is disturbed.

The role of the queen is to lay eggs for the colony.  The queen’s abdomen swells up when her ovaries start to develop so that she looks like a bloated sausage with a small head and thorax in front.  The queen’s food supply is reduced during winter months when she doesn’t lay any eggs.  When the queen begins to develop eggs again, the workers give her more food and spend time licking her for the fatty exudation given off the thin skin of her abdomen.  The young queen has a pure white abdomen but as she ages, her body turns yellow and then chocolate brown due to the staining effect of the workers’ saliva.  A brown queen can be 10 years or older.  When a queen grows too old and her fertility wanes, the workers kill her by licking her to death. 

Black mound termites live in mounds called ‘termiteria’, about 20 inches in diameter at the base and 14 inches high.  The mound is built of soil particles held together with a cement consisting of the insects’ saliva and excrement, and is blackish in color because the black mound termite blackens anything it touches.  The mound is a strong and weatherproof structure capable of keeping out most of the termites’ enemies.  Without the protection of their fortress homes, slow-moving, soft-bodied termites would have no chance of survival against their main enemy, the aggressive ant.

The mound is enlarged after it has rained, and the surface is soft and moist.  Workers build from the inside outwards, using their excrement cement to strengthen the walls.  When a hole is made in the mound, soldiers come up to defend the breach while the workers urgently get on with the repairs.  A breach in the fortress mound is a matter of life and death as ants are able to pour into the mound and destroy the colony.  When alarmed, the termites will react excitedly and jerk their bodies backwards and forwards, tapping their heads and tails on the ground as they do so. 

When repairing a broken wall, each worker vomits a small amount of dark-colored slimy material, consisting of partially digested food, soil particles, humus and chewed wood mixed with digestive juices.  This building material is always carried by the worker to be used in an emergency.  The hole is walled up as quickly as possible, in the confusion often leaving workers and soldiers outside the mound to their fate—the safety of the colony comes first.

Life-Cycle:  New colonies are started when parent colonies release winged reproductives through holes in top of the mound at dusk, often after rain, and these fly a short distance, settle and shed their wings.  Nymphs are immature males and females that are fed and treated in a way that they will grow into reproductive adults.  In their last moult, their color darkens from pure white and their 4 wings expand.  Before they leave the protection of the mound for the hazards of the outside world, their skin hardens and turns black.  These individuals are kept together in specific cells, and fed and groomed by the workers until the climatic conditions are right for their release. 

After a good rain has soaked the ground, the air is still and the temperature rising, a signal is given for wedding flight to begin.  Workers pierce holes in top of the mound and some of the ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ are released while others are kept to form a second or third swarm later in the season.  The flying termites are feeble fliers and do not travel far, with most of them succumbing to the many predators that feast during the wedding flights.  When a surviving female settles on the ground, she immediately drops her wings and raises her abdomen in the air, releasing a pheromone that attracts a male.  When the male lands, he also drops his wings and follows the female to a suitable spot to dig a hole.  Mating takes place tail to tail, with the heads of the pair pointing in opposite directions.  The couple then disappears into the ground, where the female lays 4 or 5 eggs in a special cell to start the new colony.  The pair rear dwarf workers, feeding them on the secretions from their own bodies, and reproductives are produced only after a few years.  Colony growth is very slow, taking about a decade to mature.  Colonies exist for decades and even centuries in some species.

When more inhabitants in an existing colony are needed and the conditions are right, usually after the rains, the queen is given special food so that her ovaries are stimulated and she lays the required number of eggs.  The eggs and the young that hatch are treated in the manner appropriate to attaining the required number of workers, soldiers and sexed individuals.  The queen lays several hundred white, oval eggs that are carried away by the workers as fast as she can lay them.  She then rests, laying no eggs and her abdomen returns to its normal shape.  As long as all is well in the nest and plenty of food is coming in, this cycle repeats itself: spurts of egg laying with rests in-between.  If conditions are unfavorable and there is little food, egg laying may cease and eggs that are already laid may be eaten by the workers.

Eggs collected by the workers are carried to the part of the nest where the conditions are right for hatching.  The eggs are placed in heaps, and carefully tended and licked by the workers, hatching in about a month into tiny 6-legged creatures, similar to the workers but pure white in color.  Hatchlings are fed by the workers on regurgitated food and are alike until they are about two-thirds grown.  They cast their skin 5 or 6 times and are mature at 3 months.

There is a common belief in Africa that if you destroy the queen, the entire termite colony will perish.  This, however, is not true.  If a queen dies, the workers immediately start feeding some of the nymphs in the nest so they are able to take her place as secondary queens.  This special food causes their sexual organs to develop before they are mature and they swell up, slightly smaller than their mother, with 4 small, undeveloped wings on their backs.  If there are no nymphs in the nest, immature workers are fed in a special way so that their sexual organs develop and become functional, becoming tertiary kings and queens.  They are smaller than both primary and secondary reproductives, with no eyes and no traces of wings on their backs.  Their fertility level is low and tertiary queens cannot produce nymphs, only workers and soldiers.  Colonies with tertiary kings and queens are rare.

Status:  Widespread and abundant in Africa, which has the most number of species in the world.

Remarks:  Termites are ancient insects and probably existed 100 million years ago in a similar form to what we see today.  They evolved from cockroach-like ancestors and the oldest fossil discovered is a harvest termite from the Cretaceous period.  The termite mound, also called ‘anti-heaps’ or ‘termitaria’, is the oldest type of organized community found on earth.

The termite order Isoptera contains 7 families and 2,750 species that are never found more than 50 degrees north or south of the Equator.  This is the only order where all families digest cellulose.

Many termite species are of economic significance because they damage wood, crops and fodder.

Length:      Amitermes hastatus (Black Mound Termite)   2/5  – ¾ in.    
                    Family Termitidae (workers and soldiers only)  5/32 – 5/8 in.