Ancient Home
Although we have been building houses for many centuries, we have not always constructed them in a way that achieves maximum warmth in winter and coolness in summer.
Termites, probably the most prolific insects of the world’s warmer areas learned that lesson aeons ago, but their building style left us puzzled. Why do some of them build mounds shapes like axe heads? And why does the mound’s sharper end pint due north?
The explanations have nothing to do with the Earth’s magnetic field, as was once believed. Co0mpass termites, found on grasslands in some tropical regions, build in this way to make the most of their environment. Their summer is cloudy and moist. In winter, nights are cool, but unremitting sunshine produces fierce midday heat. The termites build so that the broadest faces of their mounds catch the gentler rays of early morning sunshine which temper the night-time chill: the smallest surface – the axe head – faces the greatest heat.
Termites are not ‘white ants’. In fact they are not even related to ants. And not all termites constructs mounds, But whether they live above around or obscurely in the soil, they have a social order much like those of bees and ants, except that it includes a long-reigning king as well as a queen.