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Updated: May 7, 2025
To this the eggs are brought, and here the larvæ go through their evolution. It is a question, in fact, of maintaining these little chambers at an almost constant temperature, favourable for the development of the eggs. The substances utilised for this purpose are fragments of wood and of gum. The Termites glue them together and thus form the walls of these important cells.
The ground was literally alive with the terrible termites. They had made their foray, or "chacu," as it is called, from the neighbouring cones; they had attacked the helpless aïs, and put them to death, with their poisonous stings! Already they were tearing them to pieces, and bearing them off to their dark caves!
There is a corresponding change in the intellectual and psychical condition, a dropping out of maternal instincts, and an appearance of Amazonian coarseness and force. Such persons are analogous to the sexless class of termites.
Here soldiers were patrolling up and down with seeming aimlessness, while near-by workers labored at shoring up collapsing sections of tunnel wall, or at carrying staggering large loads of food from one unknown place to another. But now there seemed to be a certain lack of system, of coordination, in the movements of the termites.
As regards the most intelligent of the insects, the ants and the termites, the former are largely subterranean, the latter not only subterranean, but blind. In the one case, sight can play only a minor part, in the other, it plays no part at all.
Nowadays the whole area on which a house is to be raised is covered with cement or with asphalt, and care taken that no timber joists are allowed to touch the earth and thus give entry to the termites. Fortunately, these destructive insects cannot burrow through brick or stone.
The large kind, however, are more destructive, and more difficult to guard against, as their approaches are principally made under-ground, and below the foundation; they rise either in the floors, or under the posts, which in African buildings support the roof, and as they proceed, they form cavities towards the top, similar to the holes bored in the bottom of ships by the worms, which appear to answer the same purpose in water as the termites do upon land.
On every side of them now, requiring the utmost in agility to keep from actually brushing against them, were hordes of the worker termites, and dozens of the frightful soldiers. Yet on the two men moved, ever more slowly, without one of the monsters attempting to touch them. It was odd almost uncanny.
A small parrot builds constantly on the plains in a hole made in the nests of the termites, and a species of fly-catcher makes its nest alongside of that of one of the wasps. A yellow and brown flycatcher builds its nest in these bushes, and generally places it alongside that of a banded wasp, so that with the prickles and the wasps it is well guarded.
Before passing out from the glade, they stopped a moment to look at the great, conical nests of the termites, or white ants, several of which, like soldiers' tents, stood near the edge of the glade.
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