BY WALTER W. FROGGATT. 429 
appearance and are full of very fine perforations; and the centre 
of this structure, which is very brittle and crisp, has a distinctly 
higher temperature than the outside. 
On either side of this nursery where the ordinary galleries lead 
out of the finer central cells, the eggs are found piled up in little 
heaps like little grains of sand, white and rather elongated; 
perhaps as much as a big tablespoonful being found on one patch, 
and there may be several heaps close together. The formation 
now becomes slightly terraced just beyond the eggs still on a 
level with the nursery, and after breaking through a number of 
very stout terraced chambers we came upon that containing the 
queen; the floor of the chamber is perfectly flat and smooth, with 
the roof forming a low dome over her, about six inches in circum- 
ference, not unlike the cavity under an inverted saucer or watch 
glass. Though in many popular descriptions of termitaria it is 
invariably stated that there is a male with the gravid queen, I 
have never found one in a fully developed nest, though frequently 
finding a pair under stones or logs where they are evidently just 
commencing to found a community. Sometimes they were so 
much alike that it would be impossible to say which was king or 
queen, but in others found in similar situations the body of the 
queen was beginning to show the enlargement of the pregnant or 
gravid state and the difference of the sexes was discernible. As 
Fritz Miiller* has shown, in the first stages of the winged adults 
when the insects are leaving the nest the sexual organs of the 
males and the ovaries of the females are very rudimentary, and it 
is not until the act of copulation that they become perfected. 
On the evening of the 5th of October, while opening out nests 
on the Shoalhaven flats, I came upon a large nest scarred with 
narrow cuts, which upon examination proved to be slit-like 
openings about a line or more in height and an inch or less in 
length. These were all over the outside of the termitarium, and 
in each slit, with their heads level with the surface of the termi- 
tarium, but not showing beyond, was a regular row of soldier 
* Fritz Miiller. Beitrage zur Kenntniss der Termiten. Jen. Z. Nat. 
vii. pp. 337-451, 1873. 
