I oo 
The Termites, or White Ants 
nently. I have seen scores of cocoanut-palms in Samoa with their trunks 
traced over from ground to “feather-duster” top, a hundred feet above, by 
the laboriously builded wood-pulp tunnels of the termites. Each of these 
trees carried also on its trunk, about four feet from the ground, a termite 
“shed” or depot (Fig. 133), a foot thick, a foot wide, and two feet long, 
made, like the tunnels, of pellets of chewed wood, glued together with saliva, 
and filled with crowded galleries and chambers. 
Fig. 132.—Giant hillock-nests of termites in tropical Africa. 
(Adapted from Drummond.) 
But in the United States our few species make their communal nests 
in dead and dying wood, or underground, and not being given to building 
great dome-like mound-nests, or making covered ways up all the trees of 
a great forest or plantation, are not as conspicuous as their tropical cousins. 
Still, few observers of insects have failed to notice the little, white, wingless 
worker termites, scurrying about when some dead stump is overturned or 
split open, or to see the winged males and females swarming out of the 
ground some sunny day, and, after a brief period of flight, pursued by birds 
and predaceous insects, settling to earth again and losing their wings. 
Before proceeding to take up the incompletely known life-history of our 
American termites, it will be advisable to describe their general structural 
