344 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



keep enlarging the cell in which she is detained. When the business of 

 oviposition commences, they take the eggs from the female, and deposit 

 them in the nurseries. Her abdomen now begins gradually to extend, till 

 in process of time it is enlarged to 1500 or 2000 times the size of the 

 rest of her body, and her bulk equals that of 20,000 or 30,000 workers. 

 This part, often more than three inches in length, is now a vast matrix of 

 eggs, which make long circumvolutions through numberless slender ser- 

 pentine vessels : it is also remarkable for its peristaltic motion (in this 

 resembling the female ant^), which, like the undulations of water, pro- 

 duces a perpetual and successive rise and fall over the whole surface of 

 the abdomen, and occasions a constant extrusion of the eggs, amounting 

 sometimes in old females to sixty in a minute, or eighty thousand and 

 upwards in twenty-four hours.^ As these females live two years in 

 their perfect state, how astonishing must be the number produced in that 

 time ! 



This incessant extrusion of eggs must call for the attention of a large 

 number of the workers in the royal chamber (and indeed it is always full 

 of them), to take them as they come forth and carry them to the nurse- 

 ries ; in which, when hatched, they are provided with food, and receive 

 every necessary attention till they are able to shift for themselves. — One 

 remarkable circumstance attends these nurseries — they are always covered 

 with a kind of mould, amongst which arise numerous globules about the 

 size of a small pin's head. This is probably a species of Mucor ; and by 

 Mr. Konig, who found them also in nests of an East India species of 

 Termes, is conjectured to be the food of the larvae. 



The royal cell has, besides some soldiers in it, a kind of body guard to 

 the royal pair that inhabit it; and the surrounding apartments contain 

 always many, both laborers and soldiers in waiting, that they may succes- 

 sively attend upon and defend the common father and mother, on whose 

 safety depend the happiness and even the existence of the whole com- 

 munity, and whom these faithful subjects never abandon even in their last 

 distress. 



The manner in which the Termites feed the young brood before they 

 commence their active life and are admitted to share in the labors of the 

 nest, has not, as far as I know, been recorded by any writer : I shall, 

 therefore, leave them in their nurseries, and introduce you to the bustling 

 scene which these creatures exhibit in their first state after they are 

 become useful. To do this, in vain should I carry you to one of their 

 nests — you would scarcely see a single one stirring — though, perhaps, 

 under your feet there would be millions going and returning by a thousand 

 different ways. Unless I possessed the power of Asmodeus in Le Diable 

 Boiteux, of showing you their houses and covered ways with their roofs 

 removed, you would return home as wise as you came ; for these little 

 busy creatures are taught by Providence always to work under cover. 

 If they have to travel over a rock or up a tree, they vault with a coping 

 of earth the route they mean to pursue, and they form subterranean 

 paths and tunnels, some of a diameter wider than the bore of a large 



* Gould's Account of English Ants, 22. 



* John Hunter dissected two young queens. In the abdomen he found two ovaries, con- 

 sisting of many hundred oviducts, each containing innumerable eggs. 



