/ 
Theoretically, if one of these pairs succeeded in finding a decaying 
stump or other suitable location 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, being constantly and liberally 
fed and kept absolutely inactive, would increase immensely, her abdo- 
men becoming many hundred times its original size. She would prac- 
tically 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 60 per minute, 
or something like 80,000 per day. 
In the absence of a queen, however, white ants are able to develop 
from a very young larva or nymph of what would otherwise become 
a winged female what is known as a supplementary queen, which is 
never winged and never leaves the colony. This supplementary queen 

FiG. 2.—Termes flavipes: a, Head of winged female viewed from above; b, same from below, with 
mouth parts opened out. Greatly enlarged (original). 
(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 laying, and is the only parent 
insect so far found in the nests of the common white ant in this coun- 
try. Whether a true queen exists or not is, therefore, open to question; 
if not, all the individuals which escape in the spring and summer migra- 
tions must perish, and this swarming would, therefore, have to be con- 
sidered a mere survival of a once useful feature in the economy of this 
insect, now no longer, or rarely, of service. 
The normal method of the formation of new colonies is probably 
by the mere division or splitting up. of old ones—their galleries and 
branch colonies extending great distances from the home colony—or 
through the carrying of infested logs or timbers from one point to another. 
These curious insects have a very simple development. There is 
scarcely any metamorphosis, the change from the young larva to the 
adult being very gradual and without any marked difference in struc- 
ture. They feed on decaying wood or vegetable matter of any sort, 
and are able to carry their excavations into any timbers which are 
A6——12 
