February 8—An architect friend tackled me the other day, asking me a lot of questions about termites: in particular he said, "assuming there is a virus capable of killing the insect, how does it get carried from one to, the other, finally reaching the Queen and so extinguishing the colony? I was very shaky on facts and so looked up the Encyclopedia where I found some most astonishing statements. It seems that a colony consists of (1) a large fat Queen and a little King who live in a separate royal chamber (2) workers—who presumably eat wood and take the nourishment therefrom (3) two kinds of soldiers whose sole task is to defend the colony from invaders... it is impossible to give them human equivalents, but one might think of them in terms of tanks and infantry.they do not go out and eat wood (4) winged adults all ready to fly away and start a new colony (these obviously cannot eat wood when they are busy growing wings). So this brings me to the strangest fact of all. The workers are the burrowers through wood, fungus, or any other material adjacent to the actual mud nest or colony....and they thus become the suppliers of food to all the other termites right up to the King and Queen, the supply being arranged by a very strange method: any non-worker requiring a meal takes it from the body of a worker by a process of stroking or "milking": one kind of food comes from one end of the body, and a different kind from the other end. We thus find the almost unbelievable fact that every working termite is a perambulating free-lunch counter with a two-course meal always on tap. Soldiers, winged colonists, King and Queen, must depend on the wood-eating worker for their daily bread....and so if you poison the workers you must ultimately poison the lot. It all sounds to me too strange to be true, but if anybody can find a more authentic story than that given by the Encyclopædia Britannica I would be very glad to hear it,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.