Greetings, after (yet another) long hiatus from this fine forum, here i am again with a few termite pics, more precisely a small soldier and presoldier of Neotermes castaneus, a beautiful new world Kalotermitidae with a mostly central American and Caribbean distribution, but also found in southern Florida.
Since they come from a still young colony (i started with 19 pseudergates around one and an half years ago) both these specimen are markedly smaller than what you'll find in a mature nest (where soldiers can exceed 13 mm), but they are some nice critters nonetheless. As now their colony is housed inside a very soft white-rot wood piece, a solution that sadly preclude visibility but is by far the most successful for Kalotermitidae in my experience; yesterday i gently exposed a pair of their chambers to check on them (a big advantage of white-rot wood is that is so soft and easy to break open that you can do so with very little risk of harming the termites inside) and they indeed seems to be thriving, i also took the opportunity to takea few pics. So here's a pair of them:
Here we have the (still markedly undersized 
) soldier. Soldiers of this species (and of several other Neotermes aswell) sports a quite robust and bulky build, quite different from the much thinner and more elongated Kalotermes we Europeans are more familiar with.
And here's the nice, translucent presoldier. Personally i always liked this stage, i find them fascinating.
