3 



and in the social habits of the two groups, in which great similarity 

 exists. The popular acquaintance with the termite or white ant is 

 mainly derived from witnessing its nuptial spring flight, when the 

 small, brown, ant-like creatures with long glistening white wings 

 emerge from cracks in the ground or from crevices in buildings, 

 swarming out sometimes in enormous numbers, so that they may 

 often be swept up by the quart. These winged individuals are not 

 the ones which do the damage, but are the colonizing form. The 

 real depredators are soft-bodied, large-headed, milky-white insects, 

 less than a quarter of an inch in length, which may often be found 

 in numbers under rotting boards or in decaying stumps. These last 

 are the workers and soldiers (fig. 4, c and d), and constitute the bulk 

 of the colony for most of the year, the winged migrating forms, 

 consisting of the sexed individuals, appearing normally only once a 

 year, usually in April or early in May. 



The white ants present, in an entirely distinct order of insects, 

 another of those most curious communal societies which find so 

 many examples among the ants, bees, and wasps. A colony of 

 white ants includes workers, soldiers, the young of the various 

 forms, and, at the proper season of the year, the winged males and 

 females; also a single parent pair, the specially developed king and 

 queen. In the case of the common white ant of this country 

 {Termes JJavipes), the fully developed cjueen or mother of the 

 colony, swollen to great size by her enormous ovary development, and 

 her consort, the fully developed but much smaller king or male, 

 have never been found in the white ant communities, and this in 

 spite of the great numbers of the flying stage of both sexes that 

 appear every spring. The soldiers or workers are degraded or unde- 

 veloped individuals of both sexes, differing in this respect from ants 

 and bees, in which the workers are all undeveloped females. 



The economy of the termites is almost exactl}' analogous to that 

 of the ants and bees. The workers attend to all the duties of the 

 colony, make the excavations, build the nests, care for the young, 

 and protect and minister to the wants of the queen or mother ant. 

 In this they are assisted somewhat by the soldiers, whose duty, 

 however, is also protective, their enormous development of head and 

 jaws indicating their role as the fighters or defenders of the colony. 

 Both the workers and soldiers are blind. The colonizing individuals 

 difl^er from the others in being fully developed sexuall}' and in 

 possession of very long wings, which normally lie flat over each 

 other, the upper wings concealing the lower, and both projecting 

 beyond the abdomen. These wings have a very peculiar suture 

 near the base, where they can be readily broken ofl:', leaving mere 

 stumps. At the time of the spring flight the winged individuals 

 emerge from the colony very rapidly, frequently swarming in clouds 



