BY WALTER W. FROGGATT. 



429 



appearance and are full of very fine perforations; and the centre 

 of this structure, which is very brittle and crisp, has a distinctly 

 higher temperature than the outside. 



On either side of this nursery where the ordinary galleries lead 

 out of the finer central cells, the eggs are found piled up in Uttle 

 heaps like little grains of sand, white and rather elongated; 

 perhaps as much as a big tablespoonful being found on one patch, 

 and there may be several heaps close together. The formation 

 now becomes slightly terraced just beyond the eggs still on a 

 level with the nursery, and after breaking through a number of 

 very stout terraced cham])ers we came upon that containing the 

 queen; the floor of the chamber is perfectly flat and smooth, with 

 the roof forming a low dome over her, about six inches in circum- 

 ference, not unlike the cavity under an inverted saucer or watch 

 glass. Though in many popular descriptions of termitaria it is 

 invariably stated that there is a male with the gravid queen, I 

 have never found one in a fully developed nest, though frequently 

 finding a pair under stones or logs where they are evidently just 

 commencing to found a community. Sometimes they were so 

 much alike that it would be impossible to say which was king or 

 queen, but in others found in similar situations the body of the 

 queen was beginning to show the enlargement of the pregnant or 

 gravid state and the difference of the sexes was discernible. As 

 Fritz Miiller"^ has shown, in the first stages of the winged adults 

 when the insects are leaving the nest the sexual organs of the 

 males and the ovaries of the females are very rudimentary, and it 

 is not until the act of copulation that they become perfected. 



On the evening of the 5th of October, while opening out nests 

 on the Shoalhaven flats, I came upon a large nest scarred with 

 narrow cuts, which upon examination proved to be slit-like 

 openings about a line or more in height and an inch or less in 

 length. These were all over the outside of the termitarium, and 

 in each slit, with their heads level with the surface of the termi- 

 tarium, but not showing beyond, was a regular row of soldier 



* Fritz Mitller. Beitrage zur Kenntniss der Termiten. Jen. Z. Nat. 

 vii. pp. 337-451, 1873. 



