AN ANT CARRYING ONE OF HER COWS
You know about how ants keep cows, little bugs called aphids? The aphids feed on plants, and the clay viaducts protect the ants from their enemies and from the sun in going to and from the pasture; for this particular family of ants doesn't like the sun. They make clay sheds for their cattle, too. Here and there along the clay viaduct are large roomy spaces, cow-sheds, so to speak—where the little honey cows gather when they aren't feeding. Another kind of ant builds earth huts around its cow pastures. The large red ants (F. rufa), sometimes called "horse ants," build hills as large as small haycocks.
II. The Termites and their Towers of Babel
But speaking of big buildings, did you ever hear of a skyscraper a mile high? Well the home of the six-footed farmer I am going to tell you about now is as much taller than he is as a mile-high skyscraper would be taller than a man. The remarkable little creatures that build these skyscrapers are called "termites." Termites are also known as "white ants." This seems funny when we know that they are neither "ants" nor are they white. The young of the workers are white, to be sure, but the grown-ups are of various colors, and never milky white as they are when young. The termites were first called "white ants" in books of travel because the termites the travellers saw were the young people.
HOW TERMITES ARE LIKE THE ANTS
The termites are really closer relatives of dragon-flies, cockroaches, and crickets than of the ants, but they do look a great deal like an ant, and they have many of the ways of the ants. As in the case of ants, all the members of one community are the children of one queen. The king lives with the queen in a private apartment. Sometimes—as with human royalties—the king and queen will have separate residences, but the termite royalties always live in the same house with their people; they are very democratic.
Some kinds of termites live in rotten trees, which they tunnel into, and that is their contribution to soil-making; while others build great, big solid houses of earth and fibres, mixed. These houses are called "termitariums," and are six, eight, ten, even twenty-five feet high; fully 1,000 times the length of the worker. Think of a man five feet high, and then multiply by 1,000, and you see you have got nearly a mile!