692 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HIST. SOCIETY, Vol. XXUl 



Odontotermes Fece ; Microtermes was a later arrival whicli had occu- 

 pied portions of the tunnels and galleries of the " host " and was 

 now continuing the work of destruction in company with the latter. 

 So far I have only once succeeded in finding — at Ranchi ( No. 447 

 of my collection) — a colony of Microtermes living by itself alone, 

 with no other kind of Termites anywhere near it. This gave me 

 the long looked-for chance of getting exact details of the feeding 

 figure of this White Ant ; for when I discovered the nest, the 

 workers were busily engaged upon destroying a board of dealwood 

 lying on the ground. Almost the whole of the lower as well as portions 

 of the upper surface of the board was covered with crusts of dark 

 earthy material, much in the same fashion as with Odontotermes Feoe, 

 except that in this case the material employed for construction was 

 not so coarse-grained as with the latter species. After removing the 

 earthy crust or cover, the feeding figure became clearly apparent. 



As the most striking feature one should note the non-coherence of 

 the holes eaten into the wood. One gets the impression that every 

 individual had set to work' quite independent of the rest. The 

 result of this way of proceeding is an abundance of sporadic holes 

 scattered irregularly all over the wood : some of them deep, some 

 shallow, sonae long, some short, etc. Most of the holes are found to 

 extend along the soft veins of the wood ; a few of them however cut 

 right across the veins, and in this case everything — hard as well as 

 soft portions of the wood — is destroyed. I observed also tunnels 

 constructed completely inside the wood which did not reach the 

 surface at all ; but the greater part of the feeding area was superficial. 

 Hence it appears that Microtermes when attacking wood acts in 

 some respects like Leiocotermes (feeding along the soft veins, and 

 inside the wood), in others like Odontotermes Feoe (destroying soft as 

 well as hard portions of wood, feeding on the surface, building 

 covers of earthy material ) . But taken as a whole the feeding figure 

 of Microtermes is so characteristic that it cannot easily be mistaken 

 for another. I hope it will be possible to give a photograph of it 

 in one of the subsequent numbers of the Journal. 



In addition to the kinds spoken of in the preceding pages I 

 came across several new wood-destroyers in different localities. It 

 will be sufficient for the purposes of this paper to mention them but 

 briefly. They are of minor practical interest since they do not in- 

 fest houses, but are either forest dwellers or else occur so rarely that 

 the damage they do is insignificant. 



I begin with a rather remarkable wood-destroyer of the Futermes 

 tribe^ , Colonies of this Termite were abundant in certain 

 forests of the Western Ghats, east of Mangalore, up to about 3,000 

 feet above the level of the sea. It was somewhat of a surprise to 



^ For a picture of an Eutermes soldier, see fig. 10 on pi. 1 of my first paper : 

 the Double-formed Fine Termite. 



