Insect miscellanies / [Anon].

Date:
1832
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insect miscellanies / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    318/452 (page 296)
    v like state prisoners. We may remark, however, that each colony possesses only one male and female, which are, it would appear, elected after taking wing, ‘Some,’ says Smeathman, ‘ being found by the labouring insects that are continually running about the surface of the ground under their covered galleries, are elected kings and queens of new states; all those which are not so elected and preserved, perish. The manner in which these labourers protect the happy pair from their innumerable enemies, not only on the day of the massacre of almost all their race, but for a long time after, will, I hope, justify me in the use of the term election. The little industrious creatures immediately enclose them in a small chamber of clay* suitable to their size, into which at first they use but. one entrance, large enough for themselves and the soldiers to go in and out, but much too little for either of the royal pair to use ; and, when necessity obliges them to make more entrances, such entrances are never larger, so that the voluntary subjects charge themselves with the task of providing for the offspring of their sovereigns, as well as of working and fighting for them, until they have raised a_pro- geny capable of at least dividing the task with them. ’T The king and queen, after having been enclosed in this solitary cell, never afterwards quit it, but are kept close prisoners. The abdomen of the queen soon begins to enlarge, stretching out like a bag, till it becomes nearly two thousand times the size of her body. Smeathman says, he has seen it five inches Jong, of an irregular oval shape,f.and containing a countless number of eggs, of which she has been ob- served to lay as many as sixty ina minute. Instinct * See Insect Architecture, p, 292, 3. t Phil, Trans, vol, Ixxi, {¢ See Figure in Insect Architecture, p. 295. _