What Are Termite Eggs?

Termites are not ants, but they do behave like them in many ways

. In fact, termites are not even distantly related to ants, they are more closely related to cockroaches. But, as I said, termites share many characteristics with ants. They live in nests of many hundreds, thousands and even millions of inhabitants, they have a queen termite, they are governed by something we humans do not comprehend, but which we refer to as 'collective intelligence', they are fed this information by pheromones and they reproduce by means of eggs. The queen can lay thousands of termite eggs per day and there can be more than one queen per nest.

An adult termite queen is capable of producing thousands of eggs a day. This is accomplished by having an engorged abdomen. Sometimes the abdomen is a hundred times the size of a normal termite, although the head and the legs remain the same size as before.

This procedure produces quite a grotesque creature in relation to her relatives, although we obviously do not know how they look upon her. Being blind and in the gloom of a termite colony they cannot see her anyway. In some species, the queen will grow a new set of ovaries with each molting of her skin, which will increase her fruitfulness even more.

When a mature queen is at this phase in her life, she cannot move, because when she lies on her belly her legs do not even reach the ground. If she has to get anywhere for whatever reason, the worker termites will either carry or roll her there. They also tend to her toiletry needs and feed her.

It can take dozens and dozens of workers to shift the queen when she has become an egg factory. If she is moved by the workers, they are rewarded with a juice that the queen exudes from her behind. It is stimulating enough to revive the workers and encourage them to do the queen's bidding next time. The queen communicates with her subjects through pheromones.

However we try to humanize this process in order to better comprehend it, it is practically impossible to think like a termite or any other insect that uses 'collective intelligence'. We talk about 'the queen', but do termites think of her as 'the boss'? Do they pity her for not being able to get out? Almost certainly not. She has a job to perform as do the other castes of termites and it is likely that not one caste feels itself to be higher or lower than another.

Calling the various castes of termites queens, kings, soldiers and workers is just a method of explaining things in simple human terms, but it probably bears little relevance to how termites interact within their own society.

An interesting digression to the topic of termite eggs is the winged termites, also called reproductive or alate termites. They can sit in the wings waiting for the right moment to fly off and establish a new colony or one of them can be 'brought on' to replace a queen that has died or been killed.

by: Owen Jones

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