THE TERMITES 



from the interior of the trunk ; it is the wood of this trunk that passes 

 through their bowels and is ejected into the outer air. The earthen 

 nests also are built in a similar fashion; the termites excavate 

 galleries in the subsoil, eating the earth, so to speak, and ejecting 

 it from their bowels at the surface. With such a method of nest- 

 building, the more chambers are excavated, the thinner the 

 dividing partitions become, and as all the material removed is 

 utilized for further building operations, it may pass several times 

 through the bowels of the diligent architects. 



As for the actual food of the Termites, they are anything but 

 particular; it is precisely because they eat anything that their 

 mandibles can triturate when they enter a house — wood, paper, 

 leather, textile fabrics — that they are so destructive. Like the Ants, 

 the Termites do not eat only for themselves, but also in order to feed 

 king and queen and larvae, and others of their kind ; they either 

 regurgitate the food into the mouth of the hungry insect, or they 

 excrete it, when the recipient sets its mouth to the anus of its 

 benefactor. But there are termites, members of the Termes family, 

 which cultivate fungi after the fashion of the Sauvas. They prepare 

 cavities in their nests, which soon become filled with brittle, spongy 

 masses ; in the fresh state these are moist to the touch. These are the 

 compost-beds for the fungi ; they consist of vegetable matter, wood 

 and leaves, which have passed through the intestines of the termites. 

 The fungus cultivated by the termites is of another species to that 

 grown by the Sauvas ; but in this case two special nodules are pro- 

 duced, which are rich in albumen, and constitute the diet of the 

 whole race. 



Like the Ants, the Termites are friendly only to the members of their 

 own community ; inmates of another nest are, as a rule, promptly 

 attacked and torn to pieces, and on occasion the termites too fight 

 pitched battles of a deadly character. Very often, and especially in 

 the case of the species whose soldiers are "Nasuti," the workers are 

 the real fighters, while the soldiers only give orders and spur them 

 on. But skirmishes between "Nasuti" have been observed, in which 

 these curious warriors spat so persistently out of their frontal faucets 

 that the one side was eventually covered in stringy slime and glued 

 to the ground. 



Termites recognize the inmates of their own nest by the "nest- 

 odour" which clings to them. Once, when a worker was washed 



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