The Insect World: Being a Popular Account of the Orders of Insects

• " Some Account of the Termites,'" &c., in the Philosophical Transaifions^ vol. Ixxi., 1781. See, however, Professor Henry Drummond's "Tropical Africa.'*

Fig. 383. — Termes lucifugus. Male (a), Worker (b), Soldier (c), magnified. Fecundated female of Termes bellicosus, natural size, surrounded by workers (d D D d).

But the pregnant female leaves all these dimensions far behind. Her abdomen becomes two thousand times as big as the rest of her

body! She then attains to six inches in length, and weighs as much as thirty thousand workers. By a hideous contrast, the head alone does not increase in size, d d d d (Fig. 383) is an exact representation of this monster. She is always motionless and captive in her cell, entirely occupied in laying. Her fecundity sur-passes all bounds: sixty eggs a minute, more than 80,000 a day. Smeathman is inclined to think that this prodigious laying goes on during the whole of the year. "This soft, whitish beast," says M. Michelet, " a belly rather than a being, is as large, at least, as one's thumb; a traveller professes to have seen one of the size of a crawfish. The larger she is, the more fruitful, the more inexhaustible, this terrible insect-mother seems to be the more adored by the fanatical rabble. She seems to be their beau ideal, their poetry, their enthusiasm. If you carry away with any rubbish a portion of their city, you see them instantly set to work at the breach to build an arch which may protect the venerated head of the mother, to reconstruct her royal cell, which will become (if there are sufficient materials) the centre, the base of the restored city. I am not astonished, though, at the excessive love which this people show for this instrument of fecundity. If all other species did not combine to destroy them, this truly prodigious mother would make them masters of the world, and — what shall I say?— its only inhabitants. The fish alone would be left; but insects would perish. It suffices to be remembered that the mother-bee does not produce in a year what the female white ant can produce in a day. By her they would be enabled to devour everything;but they are weak and tasty, and so everything devours them."* In fact, birds are very greedy after termites; poultry destroy immense quantities of them. Ants give chase to them and eat them by legions. The negroes in Southern Africa cannot be sated with them. They gather such as have fallen into the water, and roast them like coffee; thus prepared, they eat them by handfuls, and find them delicious. The Indians smoke the termites' nests, and catch those that have wings. They knead them up with flour, and make a sort of cake of them. Travellers, moreover, all agree in speaking of them as very nice food, comparing their flavour to that of marrow or of a sugared cream. Smeathman prefers them to the famous palm worm {tc?- pabnisie of the colonists), a delicacy known in South America, which is the larva of the Calandra palmanim, a species of beetle. It seems, however, that an abuse of fried termites brings on a dysentery which may prove mortal.

■' J. Michelet, 'L'Insecte,' p. 328.

X.— Nest of the White Ant {Tenites bellicoms), in Central Africa. (After Smeathman.) I. Male. 2, 4, ■5. Neuters. 3. Gravid Female.

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All the species of termites are miners, but the greater number are ilso architects and masons. A few make their nests round a branch Df a tree. This nest is of enormous dimensions: it is as large as a ;un. The illustration (Plate X.) — after a drawing in Smeathman's work — shows a nest of the Terfms beiHcosm, composed of bits of wood firmly stuck together with gum. Above their subterranean galleries the greater part of termites construct vast edifices, which contain their magazines and nurseries. The Termes nwrdax and lermes atrox raise perfect columns, surmounted by capitals which project beyond them and give them the appearance of monstrous mushrooms. These columns attain a height of twenty inches, with a diameter of five; they are constructed with a black clay, which, worked up by the insects, acquires great hardness. The interior is hollow, or rather perforated with irregular cells; but the most curious edifices are those of Termes beliieosus. These are irregularly conical moimds, flanked by a certain number of turrets, decreasing in height. Smeathman gives them a height of from ten to twelve feet; but Jobson^' afiirms that he has seen some as high as twenty feet. If men constructed monuments so disproportionate to their size, the great pyramid of Gizeh, instead of being 146 metres in height, would be 1,600, and would be higher than the Puy- de- Dome! These knolls of earth are of a solidity which will bear any trial. Not only can many men mount on them without shaking them, but buffaloes establish themselves upon them as watch-towers, from which they can see over the high grass which covers the plain, if the lion or the panther is threatening them. These edifices are hollow; but their sides are from fifteen to twenty inches thick, and are as hard as a rock. They are hollowed out into galleries, which connect them with the underground dwelling. Under the dome is a pretty large vacant space, a sort of top storey or attic, occupying one-third of the total height, which keeps up in the edifice a more uniform temperature than if all the block had been filled up. On a level with the ground is the royal cell, oblong, with a flat floor and a rounded ceiling, and pierced with round windows. All round are distributed the offices; they are rooms also with rounded and vaulted ceilings, communicating with each other by corridors. On the sides rise the magazines, with their backs placed against the walls of the house; they are filled with gums and with vegetable juices solidified and in powder. On the ceiling of the royal chamber rise pillars of about

• "History of Gambia."

two feet in height, which support the egg rooms. These are httle cells with partitions of sawdust stuck together with gum, which separate at the opening the large chambers from the clay halls. Placed between the attics and the great nave surmounting the royal hall, the nursery is in the most desirable position possible for uniformity of temperature and for ventilation.

The royal cell encloses a unique couple, objects of the most assiduous attentions, but kept in closest captivity, for the doors are too narrow to afford a passage to the monstrous queen, and even to the male, who keeps generally crouching by her side. Thousands of servants busy themselves round the mother; they feed her and carry away, night and day, the myriads of eggs which she lays. The eggs are placed in the egg houses, where they give birth to white larvae, resembling the workers, which nourish themselves at first on a sort of mouldy fungus which grows on the partitions of their cells. They then become pupaj, then neuters, or males and females, the last two being provided with wings.

On a stormy evening the males and females come out of their nest by millions to couple in the air; then immediately afterwards they fall to the ground and lose their wings, when they become an easy prey to their enemies. A few couples only, picked up by the workers, are put under shelter, and become the nucleus of a new colony. The soldiers have no other occupation but to defend the nest. If man attacks them, at the first blow with the pickaxe they are to be seen running out furiously. They attack their aggressors, pierce them till they bring blood, and with their sharp pincers hang on to the wound, and allow themselves to be torn to pieces rather than leave go their hold. The negroes who have no clothes are soon put to flight; Europeans only get off with their trousers very much spotted with blood. During the combat, the soldiers strike from time to time on the ground with their pincers, and produce a little dry sound, to which the workers answer by a sort of whistling. The workers immediately make their appearance; and with their pellets of mortar set to work to stop up the holes, and to repair the damage. The soldiers then re-enter, with the exception of a small number, who remain to superintend the work of the masons; they give, at intervals, the usual signal, and the workers answer by a whistling which means, "Here we are!" as they redouble their activity. If the attack recommences, the soldiers are at their posts, defending the ground inch by inch. During this time the workers mask the passages, stop up the galleries, and wall up with care the royal cell. If you manage to penetrate as far as this

sanctuary, you may pick up and carry away from the cell which contains them the precious couple without the workers in attendance on them interrupting their work, for they are blind.

They never venture in sight except in extreme cases. No one is ignorant of the terrible destruction these insects occasion to the works of man. Invisible to those whom they threaten, they push on their galleries to the very walls of their houses. They perforate the floors, the beams, the wood-work, the furniture, respecting always the surface of the objects attacked in such a manner that it is impossible to be aware of their hidden ravages. They even take care to prevent the buildings they eat away from falling by filling up with mortar the parts they have hollowed out. But these precautions are only employed if the place seems suitable, and if they intend to prolong their sojourn there. In the other case they destroy the wood with inconceivable rapidity. They have been known, in one single night, to pierce the whole of a table leg from top to bottom, and then the table itself; and then, still continuing to pierce their way, to descend through the opposite leg, after having devoured the contents of a trunk placed upon the table. On account of the devastations which they occasion, Linnaeus has called the white ant the greatest plague of the Indies. There exist in France two species of termites, the Ter7nes hicifugtis, a little insect of a brilliant black (at least in the male), with russety legs, which is common enough in the moors of Gascony; and the Yellow-necked White Ant {Termes flaincollis)^ which lives in the interior of trees and does a great deal of mischief in Spain and in the south of France to olive and other precious trees, whilst the first attacks oak and fir trees. Latreille established that it is the Termes lucifugus which causes such havoc at La Rochelle, at Rochefort, at Saintes, at Tournay-Charente, in the Isle of Aix, &c., where many houses have been completely undermined by these terrible insects. But M. de Quatrefages* has proved that the habits of the termes found in towns differ in many essential points from the habits of termes in the country. And so it is most probable that the former belong to an exotic species, which must have been unfortunately imported into France by a merchant vessel. According to M. Bobe- MoreaUjt it was only in 1797 that termites were discovered for the first time in Rochefort, in a house which had stood for a long while