io6 



The Termites, or White Ants 



its existence. The life of these early, undersized individuals is short. 

 They disappear, perhaps are killed, when the full-sized individuals appear. 

 These latter, both workers and soldiers, live at least two years and perhaps 

 longer. 



The primary king and queen live for at least two years, and almost cer- 

 tainly longer. Heath believes he has evidence of five years of life. After 

 the death of the royal pair from natural or other causes, the members of 

 the orphaned colony develop from the young nymphs from ten to forty sub- 

 stitute royal forms. By some unknown process, perhaps peculiar feeding, 

 these selected nymphs are quickly brought to se.xual maturity, and the queens 

 begin egg-laying. As they are fed and cleaned by the workers, their only 

 business is to lay eggs. Heath observed some of the larger queens to lay 

 from seven to twelve eggs a day continuou.sly. In exceptional cases a 

 worker, or even a soldier, may be developed into an egg-laying queen. 

 One may also occasionally find a few winged soldiers. 



In Africa forty-nine species of Termites are known * (Sjostedt), and it is 

 on this continent that, "the results of Termitid economy have reached their 

 climax." More than a century ago an exploring Englishman, Smeathman, 

 startled zoologists with his account of the marvelous termite communities 



of West Africa. He told of the great mound- 

 nests of Vermes heUkosus, twenty feet high, and 

 so numerous that they had the appearance of 

 native villages (Fig. 132). The soldiers are fifteen 

 times as large as the workers, and the fertile 

 queen has her abdomen so enlarged and stretched 

 by the thousands of eggs forming inside that it 

 comes to be "fifteen hundred or two thou.sand 

 times the bulk of the rest of her body and 

 twenty or thirty thousand times the bulk of a la- 

 borer." He describes the egg-laying as proceed- 

 ing at the rate "of sixty a minute, or eighty thou- 

 sand and upward in one day of twenty-four 

 hours." In the South Kensington Museum at 

 London there is such a prodigious queen resem- 

 bling simply a cylindrical whitish sausage four 

 inches long. A similar specimen is to be found 

 in the natural-history museum of the University 

 of Kansa.s. 

 The enormous number of individuals in a great village of nests cannot 



Fic. 138. — Worker and 

 queen of Termes red- 

 mani. (After Nassonow; 

 natural size.) 



* Sjostedt, Y., Monographie der Termiten .\frikas, Kongl. Svcnska, Vctensk. Ak. 

 Handl., v. 34, 1900, pp. 1-236, Stockholm. 



