You may think leafcutter ants eat the leaves they cut. They do not. They carry bits of leaves to their nest. They chew the leaf pieces into tiny bits and add them to a fungus garden. They use the leaves to grow a fungus, and they eat the fungus.

A leafcutter ant colony can hold millions of ants. A Texas leafcutter colony can top 2 million, and the largest leafcutter colonies have over 8 million. When a young leafcutter queen starts a new nest, she carries a piece of the fungus garden in her mouth to start the new garden.

Black soldier fly larvae eat rotting food scraps, and what they leave behind is good for soil. Adult black soldier flies do not bite, and they live for only about six days.

The larvae turn waste into frass, their droppings and leftovers. Farmers can use frass as a soil booster, and they can feed the larvae to chickens and fish.

Some beetles eat animal dung, which is poop, and some dung beetles dig tunnels under a pile of dung and lay their eggs in it. If beetles and other helpers are missing, a cow dung pile can sit in a field for a very long time, and it can smother the grass under it. Buried dung recycles its nutrients into the soil, while dung left on top can lose nutrients such as nitrogen.

Most springtails live in soil and eat fungi, algae, rotting plants and bacteria. A few hunt tiny soil animals. Springtails breathe through their skin, so they need damp places. They live in soil, leaf litter and compost. A fork-like part folded under a springtail's body flicks it into the air when it lets go.

A pill bug, also called a roly-poly, rolls up into a tight little ball when it is bothered. A millipede also curls up when it is disturbed, and most body parts of a millipede have two pairs of legs, so it has many legs. Pill bugs and millipedes mostly eat rotting plants, but millipedes can sometimes nibble live roots.

Millipedes and centipedes are different. Millipedes are slow and eat rotting plants, while centipedes are fast hunters of small bugs. Millipedes also do not bite people or harm things in a home.

Termites are social insects that live in big groups called colonies, and worker termites find and eat the wood. A colony has workers, soldiers, and kings and queens, which are called the reproductives. Queens lay the eggs, and soldiers guard the colony. Most termites cannot digest wood alone. Tiny one-celled protists in a termite's gut help turn wood into food for the colony.

Termites are both pests and helpers. In houses they eat wood that people want to keep. In nature they turn dead wood into nutrients for other living things, and in forests they break down fallen trees and stumps. Termites eat the soft part of the wood grain first and leave the harder part. The same bug can be a pest in one place and a helper in another.

Words to know

• fungus: mold-like life
• colony: bug group
• larvae: young bugs
• frass: bug droppings
• pests: unwanted bugs