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Show DEPARTMENT AGRICULTURE" s. HE white ant or "ter-1 "ter-1 mite" is one of the so-1 so-1 called social insects that , I .lives in a highly organ-s?S8fe!sv organ-s?S8fe!sv ized community where $Vsfyk, tnere are castes royal, Sij w military, working and k z5y colonizing. Unfortunate- sbvs'a Iy for man, however, the caste system is designed to aid "white ant" communities in destroying de-stroying timber, and has helped to gain for it the reputation of being one of the most destructive pests. Crumbling walls, collapsing floors, breaking bean poles and weakened fence posts are evidences of the ravages of this tiny insidious insect. The term "white ant" is misleading, as it causes many people to consider this insect merely a variety of the ordinary -ant, and therefore scientists use the word "termite" in preference, to describe the insect. As a matter of fact, the real ant is one of the enemies ene-mies most to be feared by the termite. The two insects may be commonly found inhabiting the same log or stump, and yet the former will capture and carry away members of a colony of termites if they are at all disorganized disorgan-ized by being exposed. Such a helpless help-less colony will attract from a distance dis-tance ants of several species and will offer little resistance to the marauders. The caste system, which is such a distinctive feature of the life- of the white ant, is evident only among tha adults of a colony. When the young have just hatched from the eggs, as soft white grubs, they seem more or less the same, but after a series of dormant dor-mant stages and molts they develop along particular lines. The "workers" are probably the most important caste in any colony. They make the excavations where the ants are to live, and help care for the royal couples and the young. The "soldiers" are more highly specialized spe-cialized workers, but are functionally less important than the workers. The soldiers are armed with a powerful head and "pinchers" which afford protection pro-tection to the colony when there is an attack made through the opening of the narrow channels leading to the nests. Their suit of armor is not complete, com-plete, however, and their soft bodies are quite defenseless when a colony is opened up and an energetic army of real ants attacks them. The "colonists" are the winged members mem-bers of the community, who in the spring fly away in great numbers to found new colonies. These establish themselves in pairs and immediately devote themselves to raising a Dew community. Each original pair becomes be-comes a "royal couple" in its new environment. en-vironment. Among other social insects, like the bee, the king of a new colony dies immediately im-mediately after he has fulfilled his usefulness. use-fulness. However, the king termite continues to inhabit the cell with the ilitpiiiii if jln f llftlltlllill llillll . wojPsc o yrryy sat queen, the latter caring for the young and moving the newly hatched grubs from place to place when the colony is disturbed. Notwithstanding the fact that the white ant is such an interesting insect, in-sect, it is one of the most destructive in North America. While in a way they serve in a favorable role by converting the wood of dead stumps and trees into valuable soil material, this is more than offset by the damage they inflict on injured living trees, to say nothing of their insidious borings in all manner of timbers, props, poles and posts, which often give way without with-out the slightest warning. White ants will infest the heartwood of living trees injured at the base by fire, disease dis-ease or other insects, and sometimes in such trees they excavate upward throughout the dead heartwood, longitudinal longi-tudinal tunnels, irregular in diameter. These insects also infest the roots of living trees, finding ingress through abandoned burrows of the large round-headed round-headed bdrers. Sometimes they girdle young trees forest tree nursery stock, for example eventually cutting the trees off near the ground, and examination exam-ination disclosing that the stems were honeycombed This is not necessarily due to the presence of dead wood near by, since termites will tunnel for long distances underground. While usually confining their work to moist or decaying timber or to vegetable vege-table material of any sort, and .-to books and papers that are somewhat moist, termites will attack seasoned, dry wood, provided there is access to moisture elsewhere; i. e.. they use moist grass and earth in extending the burrows, thus creating more favorable conditions. In the southern states termites will infest the bark and outer layers of the wood of the base of yellow yel-low pines killed by bark beetles before the foliage has fallen; trees that have been killed in the spring and show reddish-brown needles and much fallen foliage being infested by the middle of Autust. Trees killed in the spring will have the outer layers of wood of the base honeycombed by the following follow-ing December. The larger-celled, thin-walled, spring wood is eaten away first, leaving the smaller-celled, harder, hard-er, summer wood uneaten. The United States department of agriculture ag-riculture has issued a bulletin describing describ-ing the white ant from a scientific standpoint, and suggesting many remedies rem-edies for limiting the ravages of these little creatures. |