Many travellers have spoken of these insects. They are met with in the savannahs of North America, in Guyana, in Africa, in New Holland, and even in Europe, whither they have been imported. M. de Prefontaine relates that, when he was travelling in Guyana, he saw the negroes besieging certain strange buildings, which he calls ant-hills. They dared not attack them, except from a distance, and with fire-arms, although they had taken the precaution of digging all round them a little fosse filled with water, in which the besieged would be drowned if they made a sortie. These were the termites' nests.
Perhaps it is to termites Herodotus alludes when he speaks of ants which inhabit Bactria, and which, larger than a fox, eat a pound of meat a day. [110] Retired in the sandy deserts, these gigantic insects hollow out (says he) subterranean dwellings, and raise mounds of golden sand, which the Indians carry away at the peril of their lives. Pliny, who relates the same fables, adds that there were to be seen in the Temple of Hercules the horns of these ants. Even in our own days some travellers have repeated absurd fables about termites. They have attributed to them a venom which one cannot breathe without being poisoned; they have said that a single bite was enough to cause a mortal fever. The truth, as it is revealed to us by conscientious observers, is still stranger than these fictions or errors. The termites present curious modifications, on the nature of which naturalists are not agreed. There are, in the first place, the perfect insects, males and females, which are provided with wings; then there are the neuters, which are divided into soldiers, whose duty it is to defend the nest, and into workers, upon whom devolve the architectural works and household cares. These last are smaller than the soldiers. Latreille and some other naturalists think that these workers are the larvæ of the termites. Smeathman thinks that the soldiers are the pupæ. M. de Quatrefages admits that the soldiers are the neuters, and that the workers are recruited both from the larvæ and from the pupæ. It may be admitted, with other naturalists, that the soldiers and the workers are neuters: the first, abortive males; the second, abortive females. Here is, indeed, what M. Lespès has observed in the termites of the Landes. Among these insects, the most numerous are the workers: their size is that of a large ant, and their duties are to excavate galleries, to search for provisions, and to take care of the eggs, the larvæ, and the pupæ. The workers have a rounded head and short mandibles, and are blind. The soldiers, less numerous, have an enormous head—nearly as big as the rest of their body—very strong, crossed mandibles, and are blind like the workers. Anatomy showed M. Lespès that both are neuters—that is, the soldiers, males, and the workers, females—with aborted organs.
The larvæ of the females much resemble the workers. Those which are to become males or females are distinguished from those which are to become neuters by very slight rudiments of wings, and their pupæ show already imperfect wings, hidden in cases; furthermore, they have eyes hidden under the skin. The males and females alone have eyes; they also have wings, which they lose immediately after the coupling. Those which proceed from the pupæ with long wing cases become small kings and queens after their swarming, which takes place at the end of May. The pupæ with short wing-cases become perfect in the month of August, and produce larger males and females, which become kings and queens. All these couples are collected by the neuters; and the queens, large and small, set to work immediately to lay. The largest are much the more fruitful. The workers do not seem to take any care of them at all. With the exception of this last peculiarity, everything probably goes on in the same manner with the exotic termites; but with the latter the queen is an object of worship.
Fig. 383 represents the four types of the republic of the Termes lucifugus. On the left is a worker, on the right a soldier, in the centre a winged male, all three very much magnified, the lines drawn by their side showing the natural size. Below the male is the pregnant queen (D D D D), of a species of which we are about to speak, of the natural size.
Many species of termites were studied with care by the English traveller, Smeathman, at the end of the last century, in Southern Africa. His account of them is the most exact and most complete which we have of these insects. [111] The largest of the species observed is the Termes bellicosus. The workers are a fifth of an inch long, the body soft, and of an extreme delicacy, but the sharp mandibles capable of attacking the hardest bodies. The soldiers are twice as long, and weigh as much as fifteen workers, and may be distinguished by their enormous horned head, armed with sharp pincers. The male weighs as much as thirty workers, and attains to a length of nearly four-fifths of an inch.
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 surpasses 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."[112] 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 (ver palmiste of the colonists), a delicacy known in South America, which is the larva of the Calandra palmarum, a species of beetle. It seems, however, that an abuse of fried termites brings on a dysentery which may prove mortal.