OBSERVATIONS ON TERMITES IN JAMAICA 195 



each deposits a mouthful of wood or other vegetable fibre of 

 the above size and then quickly reversing skillfully ejects a 

 droplet of dark liquid from the anus. This liquid rapidly loses 

 lustre as if dried or coagulated and it fastens the building par- 

 ticles together as a dark cement. There is also some little manipu- 

 lation with the mouth parts and palpation with the antennae. 

 The tendency to use the two ends of the body alternately is 

 quite strongly marked. No one w^orker tarries long at the wall 

 but each may now and then make a slight addition of cement 

 or of building particles or of both and then run rapidly along. 

 The work is carried on as is the building of comb in the bee hive. 



Under the microscope, it is seen that the building material 

 is made up of vegetable tissue with its cells in their normal 

 connection, that is not chewed or macerated apart, but merely 

 in small mouthfuls. 



In a transplanted colony the new arcades near the nest were 

 made from the material of the nest together with skins of ter- 

 mites while the arcades at the food end, near the top of a cocoa- 

 nut tree, w^ere made of the fragments found amidst the bases 

 of the leaves. 



In many cases the termites were seen to pick up fragments of 

 coral sand on the ground and run with them away from as well 

 as toward the nest. Some of these were then used to add to 

 the outside walls of the arcades, even six feet above the ground. 

 Twenty-nine of these minute stones taken from an arcade newly 

 built six feet from the ground, placed side by side formed a row 

 39 mm. long, the largest being 2 J and the smallest i mm. long. 

 The largest weighed between three and four milligrams while a 

 living worker weighed nearly five milligrams. No indication of 

 any sort of aid was seen: each worker acting alone and just 

 like any other. Each worked but a short time at any place. 



While the arcade completely hides the termites from view it 

 is not always light proof but when held up to the sky is seen to 

 be filled with chinks where the cement does not fill in the spaces 

 between the fragments. In old arcades these chinks seem to 

 be filled up and the wall made more completely of cement as 

 seen from the inside, and then but little light probably enters. 



The arcades are subject to frequent destruction and need to 

 be constantly repaired. Frequently they are abandoned and 

 new ones constructed. 



