MIGRATION AND DISPERSAL OP INSECTS '. HYMENOPTERA, TERMITES. 235 



a very small part, if any, in the dispersal of hymenoptera. 

 Generally, I think, they spread by a very slow and gradual process of 

 multiplication over suitable regions, each individual travelling in the 

 course of its life a very little way from its own birthplace, and laying 

 in the course of its restricted wanderings an egg here and an egg there 

 where suitable opportunity offers. Sometimes local circumstances 

 greatly quicken this process, e.q., when a freshly exposed sandbank at 

 once receives a great overflow of common Andrenidac and Fossors 

 with their parasites from sandbanks hard by, or when a particular 

 condition of weather tempts the Tenthredinidae imagines to ramble 

 further than usual from their own food-plant to other specimens of it 

 in the neighbourhood, so that the larva? next season appear on twenty 

 trees or bushes instead of one. But all this seems to me quite uncon- 

 nected with a true ' migratory instinct,' and even true migratory 

 instincts seem to include diverse kinds. I see little or no analogy 

 between the Bedouin movements of an army of driver ants, the multi- 

 plication of Foiiiiim colonies by dispersal of fecundated queens, and 

 the departure of an Ajm swarm from quarters that can no longer 

 contain it. Of course, in a sense, every shifting of its quarters by an 

 insect is a ' migration.' But it is one thing if I move from this house 

 to one in the next road for personal or family reasons, and another if 

 I get up a colony of fellow Britons to settle in Rhodesia for ' imperial ' 

 reasons of policy. This seems to me more or less parallel to the 

 difference between the migrations of insects with communal instincts 

 and insects without them. The migrations of birds, as far as I 

 understand them, have nothing in common with anything known to 

 me in the Hymenoptera. Hence I am rather unwilling to use the 

 word ' migration ' at all in connection with Hymenoptera, lest it 

 should suggest analogies that do not exist." 



The termites or white ants as they are almost every where popularly 

 called, have no real affinity with the true ants, indeed, there are 

 scarcely any two divisions of insects more widely different than the 

 true ants and the white ants. In spite of this great difference, 

 however, both groups lead a social life, and there is much analogy 

 between their habits. The swarming, if not the actual migration of 

 termites, has been frequently recorded. Burrows states that he 

 remembers well the curious swarming of the Natal termites, the clouds 

 of flying insects and the ground littered with the detached wings. 

 One corner of a field was one day quite white with detached wings. 

 The females fly for a while then settle and deliberately bite or shake oft' 

 their wings. In America a flight of Termes morio was reported by 

 Bickford, from Texas, as occurring on July 16th, 1891 {Insect Life, 

 iv., p. 146). They came from an easterly direction and flew from 

 ten to twenty feet above the grass. This observer also mentions that, 

 after a time, some of the specimens lost their wings. Both of these 

 are reports of swarms on a comparatively small scale. Hagen has 

 given {Proc. Bost. Soc, xx., 1878, p. 118) particulars of a swarm of 

 another species, Termes flavipes, in Massachusetts, in which the insects 

 formed a dark cloud, and were accompanied by no less than fifteen 

 species of birds, some of which so gorged themselves that they were 

 unable to close their beaks. The termite economy is such that swarms 

 similar to those just described are being continually given off. Vast 

 numbers of superfluous individuals are produced in almost every 



