INSECTS
wherever the food supply attracts it, recognizing no ties or responsibilities to others of its species and contending with its fellows, often in deadly combat, for whatever advantage it can gain. A few animals are communistic or social in their mode of life; notably so are man and certain insects. The best-known examples of social insects are the ants and some of the bees and wasps. The termites, however, constitute another group of social insects of no less interest than the ants and bees, but whose habits have not been so long observed.
 | An image should appear at this position in the text. To use the entire page scan as a placeholder, edit this page and replace "{{missing image}}" with "{{raw image|Insects - Their Ways and Means of Living.djvu/160}}". Otherwise, if you are able to provide the image then please do so. For guidance, see Wikisource:Image guidelines and Help:Adding images. |  |
Fig. 76. Termite work in a piece of wood. Tunnels following the grain are made by species of Reticulitermes, the common underground termites of the eastern United States
More familiarly to some people, termites are known as "white ants." But since they are not ants, nor always white or even pale in color, we should discard this misleading and unjustifiable appellation and learn to know the termites by the name under which they are universally known to entomologists.
If you split open an old board that has been lying almost anywhere on the ground for some time, or if, when out in the woods, you cut into
[128]
