Workers gather vegetable detritus which they bring back to the colony, chewing up the material to make a suitable substrate on which the fungus will grow.

The workers forage for suitable materials to use as a substrate for their fungus garden, gathering bark, wood fragments, dead leaves and dry dung, and in so doing do considerable damage to crops including wheat, barley, maize, pearl millet, sorghum, sugarcane, groundnut and tea.

[3] The material they gather is chewed up and bacteria in their gut help them to digest the cellulose by contributing enzymes such as cellulase and xylanase.

In some, the spherules are swallowed by the winged alates before they swarm, either the males or the females according to species, and retained as a bolus in the gut, the faeces later being used to establish a fungal comb in the new colony.

In other species, such as Odontotermes montanus, spherules are not transported, and the comb is established when foraging workers bring back basidiospores which come from the fruiting bodies (mushrooms) of the fungus which grow above ground on the termite mound.