486 Miscellaneous. 



■well-developed nest ; but the female, which is popularly known as 

 the " queen white ant," as soon as she is settled in her cell, often 

 called the " royal chamber," begins to lay eggs, and while the head 

 and thorax reinain at the normal size, her abdomen swells out into 

 a cylindrical rounded white mass as thick as a small pea-pod, which 

 renders her quite helpless and incapable of crawling about. The 

 body now consists of a great number of egg-tubes or ovaries, leading 

 into the egg-laying duct, and from this single insect flows the whole 

 life and reproductive power of the colony. The queen is carefully 

 fed and looked after by the workers, who remove the eggs into 

 adjoining galleries between her cell and the true nursery previously 

 described. The queen may lay eggs for some years, but I do not 

 think either at the rapid rate or for so long as many of our popular 

 writers have asserted, for the workers have the power (probably in 

 the method of feeding the young larvae) of producing supplementary 

 queens, which never pass through the wiuged form, but are produced 

 direct from the egg, and piobably supersede the queen in cases of 

 emergency, when she has outlived her usefulness or been accident- 

 ally destroyed. 



The workers, which constitute the bulk of the members of every 

 nest, are aborted females and males (and not only females, as 

 among the bees), whose duties are to do all the building and 

 repairing of the nests, look after the queen, eggs, and larvae, and all 

 other work in the community ; and it is to the powerful jaw^s of this 

 form that we are indebted for their destructive habits. They 

 measure about 2 lines in length, of a uniform dull white colour, 

 with large rounded heads sometimes tinted with pale yellow ; the 

 antennie formed of a number of rounded bead-shaped segments and 

 a rounded upper lip which covers the short powerful jaws ; the 

 thorax is comparatively small ; the legs short and stout, armed 

 with fine spines at the base ol' the shanks ; and the abdomen large 

 and rounded. 



The soldiers are also aborted males and females, and are never as 

 numerous as the workers. Their duties are to protect the nest and 

 drive off any enemies that appear when it is damaged or broken 

 into, and direct the labours of the workers when adding to or 

 mending gaps in the outer surface of the nest. 



They are more slender in form than the workers, with the head 

 pear-shaped and the jaws produced into two stout scissor-like jaws, 

 while above them in the centre of the head is a small cylindrical 

 opening connected with a chamber at the base of the head, through 

 which they can eject the white fluid previously mentioned, which is 

 also a weapon of defence against their enemies. 



In these remarkable households it is the blind leading the blind, 

 for neither the soldiers or workers are furnished with eyes, and all 

 their movements must be directed by their delicate sense of touch, 

 for when mending a gap in the nest the soldiers always form them- 

 selves into a regular row, standing just far enough apart for them 

 to touch the tip of each other's antennas, which are constantly 



