Organisms have evolved various mechanisms to optimally allocate their resources to different life-history traits. In hostile environments, females of solitary insects can recoup their resources that might otherwise be lost by oocyte-resorption. Queens of social insects are mainly engaged in egg production while other individuals undertake other tasks for the maintenance of the colony. Colonies of the subterranean termite Reticulitermes speratus contain multiple queens and have an obvious seasonality in egg production; initiation in May, the production rate reached its maximum in July, and the closedown in October. Based on the known hatching period, egg production rate should be decreasing rapidly in the late summer. Here we show that queens of R. speratus absorb their maturing oocytes depending on season and the state of colonies. Anatomical observation of field-collected queens revealed that queens frequently absorbed their developing oocytes in August. Our experiments demonstrated that reducing number of workers induced the oocyte-resorption in queen’s ovaries. These suggest that the egg production schedule in the termite colony is partly regulated by oocyte-resorption. It is possible that termite queens redistribute the energy from unmatured oocytes into more matured ones. Managing work-in-process oocytes can contribute to effectively use up resources within the colony.