402 The Probable Danger from White Ants. (July, 
workers of the white ants, and elected as heads of a future 
family. A clay cell, shaped like a watch-glass, serves for the 
royal pair, first as a dwelling and later as their grave. They are 
never allowed to leave it. The entrance is carefully walled up, 
and at first only one small hole is left for the workers to go in 
and out. Food is brought in and consumed. The queen grows 
visibly, and begins soon to lay the eggs of the coming brood. 
The number of eggs is immense ; the statements vary between 
eighty in every minute and eighty thousand in twenty-four hours. 
As the same queen continues to lay eggs for two years, at least 
in some species, some forty millions of eggs will have been laid 
during this time. This large number is not exaggerated ; indeed, 
the fecundity of some common insects goes much beyond this. 
The common blue-bottle fly has in one summer five hundred 
millions of descendants, and the plant-louse has in one year, in 
the fifth generation, six thousand millions, and still continues to 
lay eggs when the ninth generation is already fit for propagation. 
_ Among the vertebrates some fishes have a comparatively numer- 
ous progeny. 
` The growth of the queen increases in proportion to the num- 
ber of eggs forming in her body. When full-grown she is sev- 
eral thousand times as large as before ; that is, her abdomen 
only has grown from one half an inch to six and even eight 
inches in length. The whole body resembles a thick worm, cOv- 
ered at regular distances with brown spots, the former segments 
of the abdomen. The delicate feet are completely unable to 
move the body, out of which the eggs are forced by an incessant 
peristaltic motion. 
Meanwhile the cell of the so-called queen has been widened 
according to necessity. A gang of workers, forming a cham, 
moves about the floor and carries the eggs into the nurserles 
near by. To shorten the way they make little holes in the wa 
of the cell at regular distances. Soon we find a motley crowd 
crawling about in the nest ; very young larvae, workers and 80% 
diers, two aborted forms of both sexes, nymph, and later, min- 
gled with them, the full-grown winged imago. o 
But the nest has become too small, and we now see similar hills 
rising near by; then the partition walls are broken to conp? 
the new dwellings with the old ones ; and additions to the family 
force the brood to repeat the operation. Larger species m y 
tropics raise hills to twelve feet and more in height, strong 
enough to resist the influence of the tropical rains, and to ren 
difficult their destruction by men or animals. 
