192 
but it is supposed that pairing does not take place till a later 
period. These swarming termites are ravenously devoured by 
birds and other insectivorous animals. According to Dr. Hagen*, 
a swarm of them in Cambridge, Mass., was followed by fifteen 
species of birds, some of which so gorged themselves that they 
could not close their beaks. After such a flight, females are 
taken in charge by the workers and new colonies are forned. 
INJURIES IN ILLINOIS. 
• 
Twelve cases of notable injury by white ants in this State have 
come to my knowlege, and one was reported by Mr. B. D. Walsh, 
the first State Entomologist of Illinois. In three of these cases 
books and papers were damaged; in six, dwelling houses and other 
buildings; and in four the roots of cultivated trees. Fence posts 
and rail fences have been repeatedly found infested, and in one 
case a curious injury to bee hives found its explanation in the 
tunneling and burrowing of these insects. 
The most serious instances of injury to libraries were reported 
from the old State House in Springfield in 1868 and from the 
new State House in 1892, books and public documents having 
been destroyed in both. (See frontispiece and Plate XII.) The 
dwelling houses damaged were near Granville, in Putnam county; 
at Varna, in Marshall county; at Dunlap, in Peoria county; near 
Tonti, in Marion county, and at Urbana, in Champaign county. 
The trees attacked w T ere young pecans and apple nursery stock. 
Injuries to Houses .—A remarkable case of injury to a small 
dwelling house, built on an open prairie in Putnam county, was 
brought to my attention by a letter from Mr. H. K. Smith, written 
April 19, 1886, in which he reported that some insect unknown to 
him was literally eating up a neighbor’s house, granary, etc. Vis¬ 
iting this place, which was six miles west of Lostant, I found 
that the house (built twenty-one years before) consisted of a 
small main building resting on a brick foundation, and an addi¬ 
tional lean-to, the floor-sills of which w r ere laid upon the ground. 
About six feet from the house was a so-called cave, built in 1879 
and lined with new lumber—pine and oak plank, the latter of 
which had been brought from a saw-mill about two miles away. 
Around the yard, passing a few r feet from tie house, was a post 
and board fence, and about thirty feet away w T as a granary with 
small out-houses near by. 
The ants w r ere first noticed in 1881, when they were seen to 
collect on the floor, under a jar which had been left there for 
several days. In 1884 the wooden walls of the “cave” broke in, 
and in 1886 it collapsed completely, all the lumber in it being 
practically destroyed. The fragments of this wood remaining 
contained a great number of white ants at the time of my visit. 
They were also found in several posts of the fence six or eight 
feet away, but had not visibly affected a young ash-tree about 
ten feet from the cave. The lean-to, on the other hand, was 
* Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Vol. XX., p. 118. 
