49 
ADAPTABILITY OF KELEP ORGANIZATION TO AGRICULTURAL 
PURPOSES. 
Tt is plain that the size attained by the colonies and the fecundity 
of the individual queens by no means determine the rate of increase 
possible for such an insect as the kelep. A social economy which 
provides for an indefinite increase of the numbers of colonies and of 
laying queens may more than compensate for the absence of the ex- 
ceptional productiveness of the queens of the termites and the true 
ants. The marvelous fecundity of the females in these groups 1s, 
indeed, to be looked upon as an adaptive specialization by which 
the species is able to maintain an existence in spite of adherence to 
a most wasteful social policy, in which so much is staked on the 
vicissitudes of a simultaneous annual emergence of all the young 
and unprotected individuals of both sexes. This precarious period 
in the life history of the ants has been well described by Professor 
Wheeler. 
The sexual individuals, when finally liberated from the nests, are thrown on 
their own resources, and for a time the struggle for existence sets in with great 
severity. One has an opportunity of actually witnessing both catastrophic and 
personal elimination, often on a magnificent scale. The struggle among the 
males for the possession of the females is intense. The lives even of the for- 
tunate among the former are rapidly extinguished. The surviving fecundated 
queens set to work to establish their colonies, an arduous and complicated 
undertaking, which ruthlessly eliininates all the poorly equipped. Even before 
they can dig their nests hundreds of these insects are devoured by birds, lizards, 
spiders, ete. And many more of them die from exhaustion while digging their 
nests, or from hunger while raising their first litter of young, or from the at- 
tacks of subterranean predatory insects, parasitic fungi, ete. This struggle, 
however, terminates on the appearance of the first workers, and the successful 
queens thenceforth again lapse into a condition of domestication till the close 
of their often very long lives. 
The contrast can best be expressed, perhaps, by saying that the 
social system followed by the termites and true ants involves the loss 
of nearly all of the females, while in that of the keleps all females are, 
or may be, saved and utilized in the increase of the species. There is 
nothing to show that the very large colonies of the ants and ter- 
mites are an ar rangement advantageous to the species as a whole. 
They are rather the result of the failure of these insects to adopt the 
habit of swarming, as practiced by the honeybee and the kelep. 
From the agricultural standpoint, too, the superiority of the kelep 
organization is obvious. The division of the species into small bands 
enables the insects to spread uniformly over the fields, while large 
isolated ant-hills inhabited by hostile colonies would exclude the pos- 
sibility of an efficient protection of all the cotton. The hills and pit- 
@ Wheeler, W. M., 1902, Science, n. s., 15: 769. 
