9 
sects emerge from all the nests of the species in the same hour. The 
air is filled as by snowflakes or a plague of locusts. Lights attract 
the flying insects, and are smothered under heaps of toasted termites. 
The insectivorous birds and reptiles gorge themselves to repletion. 
By the next morning the detached wings have been blown together 
in windrows, and nothing more is to be seen of that particular species 
for another year except by digging into their nests or galleries. 
Probably not one pair of termites out of many thousands survive 
to become the parents of a new colony, but the purpose of the sacri- 
fice is accomplished if these have secured the interbreeding necessary 
to maintain the incredible fecundity by which the termite queen 
furnishes the population of a community to be enumerated in millions. 
The mothers of such colonies have been seen to lay from 40 to 60 
eges per minute. 
The true ants belong, of course, to wn entirely different order of 
insects, and their social organization and swarming habits have 
been attained quite independently. Nevertheless some of them, and 
especially the families best known to entomologists, have a domestic 
economy and a morphological diversification of the members of the 
colony surprisingly paralleled to that of the termites, including the 
habit of annual mating concourses of sexual adults. There are in 
many species, both of ants and of termites, not only the two normal 
sexes and the sterile workers, but some of the last are further special- 
ized in structure, instinct, and social duties as soldiers, foremen, 
nurses, ete. A family of American ants (Cryptoceridw) also re- 
sembles a genus of African termites in maintaining an extensive 
and highly specialized system of fungus gardens.¢ Other ants have 
domesticated plant lice, mealy bugs, and leaf hoppers for the sake 
of the honey dew secreted by these animals, which are herded, 
a@With these fungus-cultivating ants and termites, at least, it would seem 
that a new colony can scarcely be founded by a pair of sexual termites or by a 
single fecundated female ant unless they carry their domesticated fungus with 
them. It is possible, however, that in both cases the newly mated insects are 
adopted and set up in housekeeping and farming by workers of their own 
species, who bring “spawn” of the fungi from the older colony with which 
they are in communication. This might the more readily happen because long 
subterranean galleries are a prominent feature of the architecture of the 
fungus-growing insects, both ants and termites. 
The keleps, indeed, may be said to have taken a step toward the domestica- 
tion of the cotton plant. They have at least adopted it, and show an instine- 
tive interest and attraction for it in preference to other plants. That this also 
extends to a special animosity for the boll weevil as an enemy of the cotton is 
not, perhaps, to be claimed, but the habit of living on the cotton plant has 
resulted, no doubt, in giving the keleps a special familiarity with the boll 
weevils and a special skill in capturing and stinging them. 
> 
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28929—No. 10—05 M 
