I oo 



The Termites, or White Ants 



ncntlv. I have seen scores of cocoanut-palms in Samoa with their trunks 

 traced over from ground to "feather-duster" top, a hundred feet above, by 

 the laboriously builded wood-pulp tunnels of the termites. Each of these 

 trees carried also on its trunk, about four feet from the ground, a termite 

 "shed" or depot (Fig. 133), a foot thick, a foot wide, and two feet long, 

 made, like the tunnels, of pellets of chewed wood, glued together with saliva, 

 and filled with crowded galleries and chambers. 



Fig. 132. — Giant hillock-ncsls of termites in tropical .\frica. 

 (.\da[)ted from Drummond.) 



But in the United States our few species make their communal nests 

 in dead and dying wood, or underground, and not being given to building 

 great domelike mound-nests, or making covered ways up all the trees of 

 a great forest or plantation, are not as conspicuous as their tropical cousins. 

 Still, few observers of insects have failed to notice the little, white, wingless 

 worker termites, scurrying about when some dead stump is overturned or 

 split open, or to see the winged males and females swarming out of the 

 ground some sunny day, and, after a brief period of flight, pursued by birds 

 and predaceous insects, settling to earth again and losing their wings. 



Before proceeding to take up the incomj)letcly known lifc-hi.^lory of our 

 American termites it will be advisable to describe their general structural 



