Termite mounds are different from species to species although to the amateur student of termites, many of them look alike. However, an expert can often guess the species just by looking at the mound. Termites build their nests in all sorts of places. Some build theirs in living trees like bees, others build them in dead upright or fallen trees. Tree stumps are a favourite of some other types of termite, which is why it is always suggested that you remove tree stumps in termite zones.

For the technically-minded, termites are eusocial animals of the Class Insecta; Subclass Pterygota; Infraclass Neoptera; Superorder Dictyoptera and Order Isoptera. They are not related to ants in any way, although some people refer to them as white ants. Having said, that termites do share a few traits with ants: firstly, work is divided along lines of sex and secondly, the ruler of the colony is the termite queen.

Termites are not ants, but they do resemble them in many ways. In fact, termites are not even distantly related to ants, they are more closely related to cockroaches. But, as I stated, 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 controlled by something we humans do not comprehend, but which we call ‘collective intelligence’, they are given 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 colony.