COMMUNICATION" AMONG INSECTS — McINDOO 555 



enabling the offspring of one queen to distinguish members of their 

 family from those of alien families. To ants the family odor is 

 probably as important as is the nest odor, but among honeybees, 

 where certain social habits have been advanced to a higher degree, 

 the family odor is of little or no use, because the hive odor has 

 assumed such an important role in the recognition of the members of 

 the same or of a different colony. Each colony of bees has its own 

 hive odor, a small share of which adheres to the body of each member 

 of that colony, so that a bee is never entirely devoid of the hive odor. 

 Should workers be forced to remain in the open air for at least three 

 days, which is scarcely possible, they would lose their hive odor, 

 and should they then try to enter their own hive they would be 

 attacked by their sister guards because the family odor emitted by 

 them would not be a sufficient ^Droof that they were friends; if the 

 guards had also lost their hive odor they would of course let these 

 sisters enter unmolested. 



3. TERMITES, OR WHITE ANTS, COMMUNICATE LARGELY BY SMELL 



Since the social life of termites is in many respects so similar to 

 that of ants, we should expect their means of communication to be 

 similar, but from the little we know about these means there are some 

 differences. Since blindness prevails more in termites than in ants, 

 we can not consider sight as playing an equally important role, but 

 smell and touch are probably as important in termites as in ants. 

 Termites make a peculiar convulsive or jerky movement which is 

 believed to be a method of communication. Snyder says that they 

 communicate by rapping their heads against objects, producing 

 sounds audible to the human ear in some cases, but not in others. 



Banks and Snyder say that our common termites go through an 

 amatory procedure, or a kind of courtship, immediately before and 

 after the loss of the wings preliminary to mating. The male follows 

 the female tirelessly and persistently, with his head close to her 

 abdomen, and often touching her with his antennae. The sexual 

 attraction seems to be caused by a secretion at the end of the abdomen. 



No one has made a special study of the odors emitted by termites, 

 although all the writers on this subject are satisfied that these colonial 

 insects have nest or colony odors, from which it may be concluded 

 that there are also family odors and individual odors. When one or 

 more termites are removed from a community and returned after 

 hours or days of isolation they are received back into the community 

 without disturbance, but usually a termite from another colony is 

 at once set upon and killed. In the first instance the family odor 

 probably protected the termite ; in the second, the insect had neither 

 the proper family odor nor the friendly nest odor. 



