Termites or White Ants 



sprightly individual. The cares of motherhood, however, 

 have wrought wonders in her form and long before her 

 home is completed she increases enormously in size. She 

 becomes so swollen with eggs that she attains dimensions 

 thirty thousand times as great as those of the workers 

 who attend her, yet once she was little bigger than they. 

 So distended is the unfortunate queen by this time that 

 she is quite unable to move ; on this account her internment 

 is not quite the hardship it might appear, in fact it acts 

 as a good and necessary protection for her. She forms a 

 queer-looking object ; her head and legs have not grown 

 and in size " bear about as much relation to the rest of her 

 body as the tuft on his glengarry bonnet bears to a six- 

 foot Highlander." As a consequence they appear hope- 

 lessly out of place at the end of her soft, creamy-white, 

 pulpy body, which resembles nothing so much as a young 

 potato. Her attendants are kept constantly busy en- 

 larging her cell to keep pace with her rapidly increasing 

 proportions. 



Marvellous as is the rapid growth of the queen, her 

 almost incredible egg-laying capacity is far more extra- 

 ordinary. Had the fecundity of the queen termite not 

 been proved beyond doubt time and again, it would be 

 unbelievable. She produces eighty thousand eggs a day 

 at the average rate of one a second, and this not for a 

 limited period, for she never slackens her output till she 

 has produced upwards of thirty million eggs. 



How comes it that the whole tropical world is not 

 peopled by hosts of termites? They exist in plenty to 

 be sure, but the remarkable fertility of the queens is in 

 line with a well-recognised law of nature that the number 

 of young produced by a female at one time is roughly 

 proportional to the risks the young will run before they 

 are grown up. Animals with few enemies produce but 

 one or two young at a time ; with added risks the number 

 of young increases and attains its zenith with the termites, 

 some other insects and certain fishes. Many of these 



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