Carol Burkhart,, age 14, of Muncy, Penna., for the question:
How do termites multiply?
Termites are social insects, living in colonies somewhat like ants and honeybees. Though called white ants, they are not ants at all. The termite worker, about a quarter inch long, is pasty white aid quite blind. Her head is one third of her body and she does not have the ants neat waist. Her life story is also very different from that of an ant.
Both being trisects, start out as eggs. The ant egg hatches into a hungry pupa which later goes to sleep in a cocoon and finally wakes up as a grown‑up ant. The termite egg hatches into a tiny termite called a nymph. It eats and eras, fed by the grown‑up worker termites. From time to time it sheds its skin for a bigger one. It takes the little termite about two soars to grow ups during which time it goes through six changes.
All the ant eggs and all the termite eggs for a nest are laid by a queen mother. The ant queen mother is alone in her royal office. The termite queen mother shares her royal status with his majesty the king. She is a massive, flabby creature, sometimes four inches long. Her body may contain 75,000 eggs and certain termite queens lay an egg a second, day and night, for ten years. Naturally, a queen termite has time for nothing else and all her needs are attended to by the workers.
His majesty the king is maybe half an inch long and more gayly dressed than the humdrum members of the hive. His head and shoulders may be glossy black, his chest banded with black and white and his abdomen may be golden yellow. However, the blind termites never see this royal splendour. There are also a number of adult males and females in the nest and they too belong to the royal caste.
If the king or queen dies, a new king or queen is drawn from their ranks to take over the reproduction of the nest. Some of the royal princelings are winged adult: and females. Once a year, they pair off and fly away to build nests of their own. When settled, the young king and queen rub off their wings and the queen begins to lay her eggs.
Most of the eggs will become wingless workers, unable to produce eggs of their own. They supply food for the nest, tend the eggs and the queen. The eggs are taken from the queen to a hatchery chamber. Certain termites keep the hatchery warm with piles of decaying vegetation. The food of the termites, as every one knows, is wood. The worker termites devour it, eating out tunnels as they go, and digest the tough woody fibers with the help of tiny one‑celled animals which live in their digestive tracts. The royal caste, however, cannot digest wood and they are given food which has been partly digested by the workers. Some of the eggs develop into soldier termites, for there is always an army to defend the nest. The soldiers have great jaws and some have helmets.
They are about the same size as the workers and like them they are blind and unable to lay eggs. They are fed on woody fibers gathered by the workers.