Termite Queens Lay 20,000 Eggs a Day 🐜 The Blind Builders of Giant Towers
Most termites are blind, yet they build the biggest homes in the insect world. Follow one colony from a single wedding flight to a city of hundreds of thousands: a king and queen who stay together for life, soldiers with glue guns and exploding backpacks, 30-million-year-old fungus farms, mounds that breathe like lungs, and 200 million mounds in Brazil that are visible from space.
The wedding flight
One warm, humid evening, thousands of wings rise from a hole in the ground. Most of these fliers will not survive the night. But two of them will start a city that can last for decades.
Termites
This is the secret life of the termite, the tiny builder of the biggest homes in the insect world.
Cockroach cousins
Termites are not white ants. Scientists now know they are a branch of the cockroach family, cockroaches that learned to live together. There are about three thousand known species.
Wings off
After a short flight, our two fliers land, pair up, and drop their wings. They will never fly again. Together, they dig a tiny sealed chamber in the soil.
King and queen for life
She is the queen, and he is the king. In an ant colony, the males die soon after mating. But a termite king stays with his queen for the rest of their lives.
The workers
Their first children are workers. Most are blind and cannot have young of their own. And unlike worker ants, which are all female, termite workers can be male or female.
Every job
The workers do almost everything. They dig, build, collect food, clean the nest, and feed the king, the queen, the young, and even the soldiers.
The soldiers
Because the soldiers cannot feed themselves. In many species, their heads are huge, armored, and armed with giant jaws, built for one job only: defense.
Glue guns
Other soldiers carry a chemical weapon. Nasute soldiers have a head shaped like a nozzle, and they spray a sticky glue that traps ants and other attackers.
Head-banging alarm
Termites have no ears. To raise the alarm, soldiers bang their heads against the tunnel floor. Their nestmates feel the vibration through their legs, and the warning spreads through the colony. Soldiers even work out where the danger is, from tiny differences in when the vibration reaches each of their legs.
Exploding backpacks
In one rainforest species, the oldest workers carry a blue backpack of toxic crystals. When an enemy attacks, these workers burst open, releasing a poison that can kill or paralyze the attacker. The crystals keep growing as a worker ages, so the oldest workers, with the most worn-out jaws, carry the biggest backpacks.
The growing queen
Back in the royal chamber, the queen keeps growing. Her belly swells until she is many times longer than her workers. In one African species, she can lay around twenty thousand eggs a day. Workers carry each egg away to be raised, and the colony grows every single day.
20 years vs a few months
And she can live for up to twenty years, while many of her workers live for only a few months.
Eating wood
Termites are famous for eating wood. But wood is hard to digest. So most termites rely on a crowd of microbes living inside their gut to break it down for them. Bacteria and other tiny helpers do the work, and as they digest the wood, they give off methane gas.
30-million-year farmers
Some termites go further. In Africa and Asia, fungus-growing termites became farmers around thirty million years ago, long before humans planted their first crop.
The fungus garden
Workers chew up dead plants and build them into a spongy comb. A special fungus grows on it, breaking the tough plant material down. Later, the workers eat the comb, and the fungus too. Within hours, most of the tough fibers in their food have been broken down. It is one of the most efficient recycling systems in nature.
Building the mound
To protect their gardens, some termites build mounds from soil, saliva and droppings. In Africa, these towers can rise several meters high, home to hundreds of thousands of termites.
A mound that breathes
A mound works like a lung. During the day, the sun warms its walls. At night, they cool. These daily changes push air through hidden channels, carrying stale carbon dioxide out of the nest. During the day, carbon dioxide in the center of a mound can build up to several percent.
Nature's blueprint
Engineers study these mounds for ideas about buildings that could cool and ventilate themselves, without using machines.
Islands of green
Termites also help whole landscapes. Their mounds hold water and nutrients, creating islands of green. In dry lands, these islands help plants survive droughts, and slow the spread of the desert. Even when rain fails and the plants around them shrink, the green on the mounds holds steady.
200 million mounds
In Brazil, one termite species has built a field of around two hundred million mounds, so big it can be seen from space. Some of these mounds are about four thousand years old. These mounds are not nests. They are piles of soil dug out of a vast network of tunnels below, and the termites that made them still live there today.
A new flight
Years after that first night, our colony is strong. And on another warm, humid evening, thousands of new kings and queens rise into the air.
Builders, farmers, soldiers
Termites. Blind builders, farmers and soldiers, who quietly shape the land beneath our feet.
Prefer to watch? This whole story is told in our 6:00 animated documentary.
Sources
Every fact in this article and video was checked against these sources.
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Media credits: footage from Pexels (Pexels License); music from the YouTube Audio Library ("Level" by The Grey Room / Density & Time, "Floating Lanterns" by The Mini Vandals, YouTube Audio Library License); sound effects made for this video. Narration: Microsoft Edge neural TTS (en-US-AndrewMultilingualNeural). Cut-paper illustrations drawn for this video.
