72 



PRINCIPAL HOUSEHOLD INSECTS. 



Theoretically, if one of these pairs succeeded ia finding a decaying 

 stumi> or other suitable condition at hand, tliey would center it, and the 

 king and queen, being both active, would attend to the wants of the new 

 colony and superintend the rearing of the first brood of workers and 

 soldiers, which would then assume the laborious duties of the young 

 colony. Thereafter the queen, by constant and liberal feeding and 

 absolute inaction, would increase immensely, her abdomen becoming- 

 many thousand times its original size. She would practically lose the 

 power of locomotion and become a mere egg-laying machine of enormous 

 capacity. Allied species whose habits have been studied in this par- 

 ticular indicate an egg-laying rate of CO per minute, or something like 

 80,000 per day. 



In the absence of a queen, however, white ants are able to develop 

 from a very young larva or a nymph of what would otherwise become a 

 winged female what is known as a supplementary queen, which is never 

 winged and never leaves the colony. This supplementary queen (fig. 

 31, a) is smaller than the perfect sexed queen, but subserves all the needs 



Fic. 29. — Termes Jlavijies: a, liead of winged female viewed from above; b, same from below, with 

 moiitb i^arts opened out — greatly enlarged (original). 



of the colony in the matter of egg laying, and is the only parent insect 

 so far found in the nests of tlie common white ant in this country. 

 Whether a true queen exists or not is, therefore, open to question; if 

 not, all the individuals which escape in the spring and summer migra- 

 tions must perish, and this swarming would, therefore, have to be con- 

 sidered a njere survival of a once useful feature in the economy of this 

 insect, now no longer, or rarely, of service. 



The normal method of the formation of new colonies is probably by 

 the mere division or splitting up of old ones or tbe carrying of infested 

 logs or timbers from one point to another. 



The development of these curious insects is very simx^le. There is 

 scarcely any metamorphosis, the change from the young larva to the 

 adult being very gradual and without any marked difference in struc- 

 ture. They feed on decaying wood or vegetable material of any sort, 

 and are able to carry their excavations into any timbers which are 

 moistened, or into furniture, books, or papers stored in rooms which 

 are at all moist. Their food is the finely divided material into which 



