Home › Volumes › Insects › Book-lice and Their Allies

Book-lice and Their Allies — Part 4

The damage done by termites in tropical regions is very great. In Central America it seems almost impossible to erect wooden telegraph poles which will last for any length of time, since they are tunneled by these creatures and weakened to their fall in an incredibly short time. Accounts of damage done in houses, both in Tropical America and in Africa, as well as in British India, occur commonly in the literature. A striking account, however, of damage in Rhodesia occurs in the Zambesi Mission Record for January, 1901, written by the Rev. A. Leboeuf, and which is quoted in Nature. " `It is no uncommon thing' says the writer 'for the colonist, on returning from his day's labor, to find the coat he left hanging on a nail on his cottage wall and the books on the table absolutely destroyed by these tiny marauders.' Nor is this all. 'On awakening next morning,' writes Mr. Leboeuf, 'you are astonished to see in the dim light a cone-shaped object rising from the brick floor a short distance from your bed, with two holes on the top like the crater of a miniature volcano. Upon closer examination you discover that the holes have just the size and shape of the inside of your boots, which you incautiously left on the brick floor the night before. They have given form and proportion to an ant heap, and nothing is left of them except the nails, eyelets and, maybe, part of the heels.'"

There are certain insects which belong to the family Embiidae which seem to have a relationship to the termites but their detailed consideration may well be omitted from this work, since but a single species is known in North America, namely, Oligotoma hubbardi Hagen, and which occurs rarely in Florida.