White Ants 



and perhaps even a little farther north, this insect becomes a 

 serious pest in houses, particularly in old houses which are rather 

 damp. They make their nests in old beams, such as the main 

 floor joists, and construct innumerable tunnels, running usually 

 with the grain, so that, although a great deal of the substance of 

 the wood is devoured, the main longitudinal fibers support 

 the building structure for a long time; in fact, their presence 

 in many cases would not be noticed except for the spring 

 flight of the winged males and females. Quite recently a 

 handsome private residence in the city of Baltimore was found to 

 have its timbers on the first floor reduced almost to shells by the 

 workers of this insect. Further south, not only the buildings, 

 but even furniture is destroyed by them in the same way. They 

 seem especially fond of paper, and Forbes has recorded the fact 

 that a collection of books and papers of the state of Illinois was 

 completely ruined by them. A school library in South Carolina, 

 which had been left closed for the summer, was found, on being 

 opened in the autumn, to be completely eaten out and rendered 

 valueless. The work of these insects was brought home strongly 

 to the writer on one occasion when a lot of records and documents 

 stored in a vault in the Department of Agriculture was found to 

 be mined and ruined by them; and again, the floor of one of the 

 largest sections of the United States National Museum was annu- 

 ally undermined and weakened until it was torn up and replaced 

 with cement. Whenever an old beam is found to have been 

 hollowed out, even if no insects are present, it can readily be 

 identified as the work of termites by the fact that all of the 

 galleries are plastered with a brownish, mortar-like substance 

 composed of excrement, from which, apparently, all nourish- 

 ing food has been taken. In Florida this insect is often the cause 

 of great damage to orange trees, working around the crown and 

 in the roots of trees, and altogether it is a thoroughly bad 

 character. 



In the most general terms the life of a termite colony is about 

 as follows: After the so-called nuptial flight (which is made 

 usually at a certain time of the year, and with Vermes flavipes 

 it is generally in the spring) composed of winged individuals of 

 both sexes, male and female, and which always, except when it 

 occurs in houses, attracts birds and other insect-eating creatures 

 so that most of the individuals are destroyed, the wings of the 



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