SKYSCRAPERS A MILE HIGH
"Some kinds of termites build great, solid houses of earth and fibres mixed. These houses are six, eight, ten, even twenty-five feet high, fully one thousand times the length of the worker. Think of a man five feet high and then multiply by one thousand, and you see you have got nearly a mile."
These termite skyscrapers aren't much to look at on the outside, but inside they're just fine; they have everything the most particular ant could want. For instance, the termites are right up-to-date in their ideas about fresh air, their houses being well ventilated through windows left in the walls for that purpose. You can see the importance of this fresh-air system when you know there are thousands of termites under the same roof. They also have a sewage system for carrying off the water of the rains. And a fine piece of mechanical engineering the building of it is, too; for these "water-pipes" are the underground passages hollowed out in getting the clay to build the homes. The termites build their homes with one hand and dig the sewer with the other, so to speak.
THE THERMOSTATS FOR THE NURSERIES
The termitarium has as many rooms in it as a big hotel—oh, I don't know how many—and they are all built around the chambers of the king and queen. Next to the royal apartments are the pantries, a lot of them, and they are all stored with food. In the upper part of the termitarium are the nurseries—many nurseries—for no one nursery could care for any such numbers of babies as the queen has. Between the nursery and the roof is an air-space, and there are also air-spaces on the sides and beneath. The nursery thus being surrounded by air, the eggs and, when they come along, the babies are protected from changes of temperature. It's the same principle that's employed in making refrigerators and thermos bottles. The rooms in which the eggs are kept are divided by walls made of fragments of wood and gum glued together. This mixture is a bad conductor[14] of heat or cold. And so the eggs are kept at an even temperature.
While we cannot see any of the termite skyscrapers in the United States, because we have none of the species of termites that build them, we can see a member of the termite family. This is the common white ant that digs into joists of houses. On the outside of these same joists, and up in the attics of old farmhouses, if there happens to be a broken window-pane, or some other hole through which she can get in, you can see the nest of another tiller of the soil, the wasp. The mason-wasps or mud daubers are the most common. You will find their nests on the rafters of the barn when you go to throw down hay, or when you go into the corn-crib. They have all sorts of fancies—these wasps—about their clay homes and where to build them. Some build on the walls and some in the corners of rafters, others prefer outdoor life. Some want to live alone, others like society. What are known as "social" wasps sometimes build their nests in tiny hollows that they dig in the ground; others fasten their nests to the boughs of trees. The work of these wasps, from the farming standpoint, is useful not alone in grinding the soil, but helping to supply it with humus; for their nests are made of wood fibre, which they tear with their mandibles from gateposts, rail fences, and the bark of trees.
