2 
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 problems of 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 flavipes), the 
fully developed queen 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 undeveloped 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 exactly 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 pro- 
tective, 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 differ from the others in 
being fully developed sexually and in the 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 
off, leaving mere stumps. At the time of the spring flight the winged 
individuals emerge from the colony very rapidly, frequently swarming 
in clouds 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 happens. They are weak flyers, clumsy, and 
not capable of extensive locomotion on foot, and are promptly preyed 
upon and destroyed by many insectivorous animals, so that rarely indeed 
do any of the individuals escape. 
A6—12 
