CHAPTER VII 



THE TERMITES, OR WHITE ANTS (Order Isoptera) 



NCE when camping in the King's River 

 Canon, one of the great vertical-walled, flat- 

 floored canons of the Sierra Nevada, the 

 boldest axeman of our party attacked the 

 fallen trunk of a once towering yellow pine. 

 The practical outcome of this attack was 

 a sufficient supply of firewood for the 

 cook's stone-built stove, but the great log 

 yielded better things than chips and chunks. 

 A few blows showed it to be the home of 

 a thriving colony of the largest of the 

 American termites (Termopsis angusticollis) , and the thousands of indi- 

 viduals in this insect household were objects of interested observation 

 the summer through. We had heard of the rarity of white-ant queens in 

 collections, and saw in this isolated and apparently easily "rounded-up" 

 community an easy chance to discover the egg-laying queen of this species. 

 But we had not reckoned with the Californ a manner of tree-trunk : it 

 outlasted the summer's chopping by two score feet of log four feet thick. 

 Yellow pines grow 250 feet high in the Sierran forests. But although 

 no queen was found, the make-up of the buried termite city was revealed. 

 Galleries and chambers, secret ways and narrow tunnels were all ex- 

 posed, and the interesting communal life of these soft, white-bodied little 

 creatures was made partly known to us. 



We have in the United States but few kinds of termites, and these 

 much less interesting in habit than those of tropic lands. The Amazons 

 and Central Africa are the centers of termite life, and there, because of their 

 great mounds, their serious ravages on all things wooden, and their enor- 

 mous numbers, the white ants come to be nearly the most conspicuous of 

 the insect class. Drummond's account, in his Tropical Africa, of the habits 

 and life of the termites of the Central African region is simply a tale of 

 marvels. And the scattered accounts of the Brazilian species are hardly 

 less wonderful. In the South Sea, too, the termites play their part promi- 



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