Termites

The termite is a pallid, squashy little bug which would be of no importance whatever were it not for its depraved appetite. It likes to eat wood. That taste makes it immensely important to building owners in tropical and warm temperate regions. Termites do yearly damage estimated at $29,000,000 to farm buildings in the South. Seven years ago they began to alarm California. Last week Entomologist George Ethelbert Sanders of the American Museum of Natural History sent a shiver through New York City by waking it to the fact that for the first time it is seriously infested with termites.

There are over 1,200 species of termite, some 40 of them in the U. S. New York's variety builds its labyrinthine nests in the soil beneath buildings, crawls up into wooden beams and floors. It eats from the inside so that owners are unaware of damage until shell-like or spongy timbers collapse. First intimation a young New Jersey couple got was when they beheld, through a gaping parlor floor, their grand piano in the cellar.

Termites multiply rapidly, work slowly but thoroughly. New York's invasion came three years ago; whence, no one knows. Now every section of the metropolitan area is infested. A theatre near Times Square, a building downtown, apartment houses in The Bronx, homes in Queens, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Staten Island are being undermined.

To make a building termite-proof costs only $50 to $100 during construction, may run from $500 to $2,000 afterwards. Timbers should be treated with insecticide, a metal sheet or other barrier placed be tween ground and wood. This bars out insects in the ground, kills those already in the wood by keeping them away from ground moisture. Foundation timbers, basement walls and flooring should be kept dry. Hating light, termites build mud-covered runways up concrete foundation walls. Lately some builders, believing the insects will not cross them, have used glass bricks to top their walls.

In the U. S. termites are commonly called "white ants." But they are not ants and are not always white. Termites maybe readily distinguished from ants by the absence of a '"waist" or constriction where abdomen joins thorax. They look more like tiny cockroaches, but they have a social organization antlike in its complexity.

Most termite colonies are divided into five castes, apparently determined in the egg. Topping the social scale are the king & queen. They have wings and reproduce. Next come two wingless courtier castes, also fertile, which may step into the reproductive breach if king or queen should die. To the termite proletariat belong the pinheaded, speck-brained workers which do all the damage (see cut, left), the soldiers big of head & jaws. More potent than the fighter shown (cut, right) is a type with retort-shaped head from which it squirts a pungent secretion on its enemies, chiefly ants. These two castes are sterile and of both sexes, unlike ants whose females do all the work and fighting.

Periodically a colony's young kings & queens swarm out into the open, shed their wings. Those which survive birds, lizards and man pair off to start new colonies. They care for offspring until enough workers have grown up to take care of the community. Then the king & queen settle down to steady reproduction. The queen becomes a huge inert egg-laying machine with a production capacity of some 50,000 per day. The king is a tiny fellow whose main function is to be the queen's husband. They cohabit for life, which may last ten years. Their offspring feed them and each other with food either regurgitated or exuded through the skin. Some species sprout an edible fungus garden in which the young may graze.

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