But the pregnant female leaves all these dimensions far behind. Her abdomen becomes two thousand times as big as the rest of her body! She then attains to six inches in length, and weighs as much as thirty thousand workers. By a hideous contrast, the head alone does not increase in size. D D D D (Fig. 383) is an exact representation of this monster. She is always motionless and captive in her cell, entirely occupied in laying. Her fecundity surpasses all bounds: sixty eggs a minute, more than 80,000 a day. Smeathman is inclined to think that this prodigious laying goes on during the whole of the year. "This soft, whitish beast," says M. Michelet, "a belly rather than a being, is as large, at least, as one's thumb; a traveller professes to have seen one of the size of a crawfish. The larger she is, the more fruitful, the more inexhaustible, this terrible insect-mother seems to be the more adored by the fanatical rabble. She seems to be their beau ideal, their poetry, their enthusiasm. If you carry away with any rubbish a portion of their city, you see them instantly set to work at the breach to build an arch which may protect the venerated head of the mother, to reconstruct her royal cell, which will become (if there are sufficient materials) the centre, the base of the restored city. I am not astonished, though, at the excessive love which this people show for this instrument of fecundity. If all other species did not combine to destroy them, this truly prodigious mother would make them masters of the world, and--what shall I say?--its only inhabitants. The fish alone would be left; but insects would perish. It suffices to be remembered that the mother-bee does not produce in a year what the female white ant can produce in a day. By her they would be enabled to devour everything; but they are weak and tasty, and so everything devours them."[112] In fact, birds are very greedy after termites; poultry destroy immense quantities of them. Ants give chase to them and eat them by legions. The negroes in Southern Africa cannot be sated with them. They gather such as have fallen into the water, and roast them like coffee; thus prepared, they eat them by handfuls, and find them delicious. The Indians smoke the termites' nests, and catch those that have wings. They knead them up with flour, and make a sort of cake of them. Travellers, moreover, all agree in speaking of them as very nice food, comparing their flavour to that of marrow or of a sugared cream. Smeathman prefers them to the famous palm worm (_ver palmiste_ of the colonists), a delicacy known in South America, which is the larva of the _Calandra palmarum_, a species of beetle. It seems, however, that an abuse of fried termites brings on a dysentery which may prove mortal. [112] J. Michelet, "L'Insecte," p. 328. [Illustration: X. Nest of the White Ant (_Termes bellicosus_), in Central Africa, after Smeathman. 1. Male. 2, 4, 5. Neuters. 3. Gravid Female.]