106 
The Termites, or White Ants 
its existence. The life of these early, undersized individuals is short. 
They disappear, perhaps are killed, when the full-sized individuals appear. 
These latter, both workers and soldiers, live at least two years and perhaps 
longer. 
The primary king and queen live for at least two years, and almost cer¬ 
tainly longer. Heath believes he has evidence of five years of life. After 
the death of the royal pair from natural or other causes, the members of 
the orphaned colony develop from the young nymphs from ten to forty sub¬ 
stitute royal forms. By some unknown process, perhaps peculiar feeding, 
these selected nymphs are quickly brought to sexual maturity, and the queens 
begin egg-laying. As they are fed and cleaned by the workers, their only 
business is to lay eggs. Heath observed some of the larger queens to lay 
from seven to twelve eggs a day continuously. In exceptional cases a 
worker, or even a soldier, may be developed into an egg-laying queen. 
One may also occasionally find a few winged soldiers. 
In Africa forty-nine species of Termites are known * (Sjostedt), and it is 
on this continent that “the results of Termitid economy have reached their 
climax.” More than a century ago an exploring Englishman, Smeathman, 
startled zoologists with his account of the marvelous termite communities 
of West Africa. He told of the great mound- 
nests of Termes bellicosus, twenty feet high, and 
so numerous that they had the appearance of 
native villages (Fig. 132). The soldiers are fifteen 
times as large as the workers, and the fertile 
queen has her abdomen so enlarged and stretched 
by the thousands of eggs forming inside that it 
comes to be “fifteen hundred or two thousand 
times the bulk of the rest of her body and 
twenty or thirty thousand times the bulk of a la¬ 
borer.” He describes the egg-laying as proceed¬ 
ing at the rate “of sixty a minute, or eighty thou¬ 
sand and upward in one day of twenty-four 
hours.” In the South Kensington Museum at 
London there is such a prodigious queen resem¬ 
bling simply a cylindrical whitish sausage four 
inches long. A similar specimen is to be found 
in the natural-history museum of the University 
of Kansas. 
The enormous number of individuals in a great village of nests cannot 
* Sjostedt, Y., Monographic der Termiten Afrikas, Kongl. Svenska, Vetensk. Ak. 
Hand!., v. 34, 1900, pp. 1-236, Stockholm. 
Fig. 138. — Worker and 
queen of Termes red- 
mani. (After Nassonow; 
natural size.) 
