Macrotermes bellicosus

The termite is an insect I personally see and appreciate very much. I love this insect because way back in high school, I learnt in Biology that they are social insects which means, there is a division of labour and every insect in the colony knows exactly what to do I think as human we could enact something like this and use J. In every colony, there is a queen, a king, workers, and soldiers.

The queen is the largest amongst all of them. It can grow to a length of 14cm which is very long considering that it is an insect. The king is the second largest in the colony, it can grow to a length of 40mm which is relatively very low considering the size of the queen. The soldiers are next and they come in two forms; the mandibulate soldier and the nasute soldier. Their job is simply to protect the colony against invasion from other insects, animals, or predators. The workers have quite unique duties. Some feed the queen when she is laying eggs, some go in search of food, some cater for the young and eggs laid by the queen. The queen’s duty is to mate with the king and lay eggs. The queen is capable of laying hundreds of thousands of eggs in a day.  

The large nature of the queen is purposely for the laying of eggs. Her abdomen is modified into a huge chamber where thousands of eggs are produced after a nuptial flight (mating). Even though this insect (termite) is a social insect, its feeding habit is very harmful to human beings.

They feed on untreated wood. When wood is harvest and used for furniture without treating it with chemicals, termites can easily breed in this wood and with their strong chewing mouth parts, they can easily destroy the furniture. Some also feed on paper, paper is made from wood so it also a nice delicacy for termites, when you are storing your books beware of termites. A bite from a termite is as painful as anything you could imagine of. With their strong mouth parts, when a human is bitten by this insect, medication is sometimes needed before the pain could be subdued. The nuptial flight of the termite is very naughty. This is because when it rains, they develop wings which is used for the flight and they do it at night in the presence of light. What this means is that, you could be in your home and all of a sudden you would see hundreds of flying termites around the bulb in your house because they are attracted to it. This features of the termites makes them very vulnerable. In some communities in Ghana, I understand that the termite is a very nice diet for them. So they harvest the termites when they fly towards their lights and make a diet out of them. It is a shame that I am a vegetarian, I would have tried it one day!