THE TERMITES 



this body the head and thorax, with its six legs, look like the little 

 knot at the end of a sausage. With such a figure it is of course im- 

 possible that the queen should ever leave her cell ; even if she could 

 force her way through the galleries — which are all much narrower 

 than her body — her monstrous abdomen would make all progress 

 impossible when she reached the outer world. 



But the queen is not alone in her cell. Her spouse shares her 

 quarters with her. The male selected for breeding purposes has thus 

 a better time of it than among the bees and ants, for he does not 

 pay for the pleasure of the nuptial flight with his life, but is permitted 

 to accompany his queen to the royal chamber. This peculiarity of 

 the Termites is explained by the fact that in the case of these insects 



^^/fN_^ -^^^^1^ 



Fig. 37. — Termite Queen, with vast abdomen, surrounded, fed, 

 cleansed and licked by Workers, and guarded by a ring of 

 Soldiers. Beside her is the "king." {After Escherich) 



a single act of fertilization does not suffice the queen for the period 

 of her life ; on the contrary the king has to be constant in his duty. 

 The fertility of the termite female is consequently inconceivable. 

 Escherich has calculated that in the course of her ten years' life 

 the queen lays a hundred million eggs. 



And actually, if one watches the queen in her cell, one sees that 

 once in every two seconds an e^gg emerges from the opening in her 

 abdomen. It is instantly grasped by one of the workers who con- 

 stantly surround the queen, and even climb upon her body, and is 

 borne out of the press, cleansed, and carried to the adjacent chambers, 

 the nurseries, for further tending. The process is repeated with 

 mechanical regularity. Since the stream of eggs never ceases, the 

 workers have constantly to leave the chamber, and since among 

 them there are those whose duty it is to feed the queen — a few of 

 them are always busy about her mouth — the great number of workers 

 in the queen's chamber is readily explained. 



329 



