24 
THE TERMITE SOCIETY. 
Interbreeding maintained by a simultaneous annual concourse of all the recently 
matured insects of both sexes. 
Colony founded by a pair of sexual insects which remain permanently mated. 
Wings provided with transverse sutures which enable the insects to break them 
off readily by an upward bending of the abdomen. Both sexes shed their 
wings in this manner as soon as they have associated in pairs, and then 
begin digging in the ground. 
Workers of both sexes always wingless, numbered by thousands or even by 
millions, generally of diverse form, or of two or more distinet castes—sol- 
diers, nurses, ete. 
Several of these features are not shared by any of the types of 
organization found among the bees, wasps, ants, or other Hymenop- 
tera. It is only among the termites that the males are regularly 
found with the females in the nests. Among the Hymenoptera the 
males are relatively short-lived and take no part in the work of the 
colony. Sometimes they are not even tolerated in the nests. <A single 
fecundation suffices for the lifetime of the queen bee or ant, while 
among the termites the process is probably repeated. Copulation 
has never been observed among the termites; it does not take 
place during the mating flight, as among the bees. The wings of 
Hymenoptera are not provided with sutures to render them easily 
detachable. Males are permanently winged in all the groups; in 
some the workers are wingless, and in some the females also. Among 
the ants the queen is artificially wingless, as in the termites. She bites 
off her own wings after the marriage flight. 
Perhaps the most fundamental peculiarity of the termite organiza- 
tion hes in the fact that the workers, soldiers, nurses, or whatever the 
various castes may be called, are of both sexes, instead of being unde- 
veloped females only, as among the bees and ants. Whether a young 
bee larva shall develop into a queen or become stunted into a worker 
or so-called “ neuter” depends upon the quantity, and perhaps also 
the quality, of the food supplied to it. Among the honeybees special 
brood cells are prepared in advance for the males, the workers, and 
the queens which the colony proposes to raise. 
EXPLANATIONS OF WORKER CASTE, 
It has been supposed that the differentiation of the members of 
termite colonies is governed in the same manner, by nutrition merely, 
but this is rendered very doubtful by the fact stated above, that the 
workers of all the different castes represent stunted individuals of both 
sexes. Another serious weakness in the nutrition theory les in the 
fact that the larvee of the termites are not mere helpless, inactive 
grubs, as in all the social Hymenoptera, but are quite as capable.of 
locomotion as the adult workers, and are always traveling about to 
