3 



'out of doors, and after a short flight fall to the ground and very 

 soon succeed in breaking off their long, clumsy wings at the suture 

 referred to. In this swarming or nuptial flight they come out in 

 pairs, and under favorable conditions each pair might become 

 especially developed, as described above, and establish a new colony, 

 but in point of fact this probably rarely, if ever, happens. They 

 are weak flyers, clumsy, and not capable of extensive locomotion on 

 foot, and are promptly preyed upon and destroyed by many insec- 

 tivorous animals, and rarely indeed do any of the individuals escape. 

 Theoretically, if one of these pairs succeeded in finding a decaying 

 stump or other suitable condition at hand, they would enter it, and 

 the king and queen, being both active, would attend to the wants 

 of the new colony and superintend the rearing of the first brood of 

 workers and soldiers, which would then assume the laborious duties 

 of the young colony. Thereafter the queen, by constant and liberal 

 feeding and absolute inaction, would increase immensel}', her abdo- 



FiG. 2. 



-Tcrmi'K JIavipes: a, head of winged female viewed from above; '», saiiK; I'rom below, 

 witli moutli-parts opened out— greatly enlarged (original). 



men becoming many hundred times its original size. She would 

 practically lose the power of locomotion and become a mere egg- 

 laying machine of enormous capacity. Allied species whose habits 

 have been studied in this particular indicate an egg-laying rate of 

 no per minute, or something like 80,000 per day. 



In the absence of a (pieen, however, white ants are able to develop 

 from a very young larva or a nymph of what Avould otherwise 

 become a winged female what is known as a supplementary queen, 

 which is never winged and never leaves the colony. This supple- 

 mentary queen (fig. 4, a), for the discovery of which we are indebted 

 to the late H. G. Hubbard, is smaller than the perfect sexed queen, 

 but subserves all the needs of the colony in the matter of egg lajnng, 

 and is the only parent insect so far found in the nests of the common 

 white ant in this country. Whether a true queen exists or not is, 

 therefore, open to question ; if not, all the individuals which escape 

 in the spring and summer migrations must perish, and this swarm- 

 ing would, therefore, have to be considered a mere survival of a 



