“The chemicals are often laid down on trails, too. We mentioned the insect problem of handling food too large for an individual. Well, believe it or not, there is an insect, the fire ant, called Solenopsis, with a special gland to secrete a pheromone that summons its fellows to help move food it can’t manage alone. This chemical happens to function by evaporation, and the workers can easily follow its smell in the air right to the prey.”

“Fascinating,” Bonnie said to Elizabeth, her eyes bright with interest. “I’m beginning to wish I’d taken biology!”

Hubbard disengaged his pipe. “Tell them about trophallaxis, Wanda.”

She laughed at the blank looks the scientific word evoked. “Don’t let that scare you. Trophallaxis happens to be a most dramatic aspect of insect communication. It means that one insect of a nest feeds another one by means of regurgitation, so whatever one insect eats travels through the colony in this form from one individual to another. In one experiment, individuals were fed a radioactive syrup outside the nest. When the brood was later examined, the stomach contents were found to be the same in every one of the insects. The radioactivity had been spread through all the members!”

Ben Dorset slapped his thigh. “Never heard a fish story to beat that in my life!”

“It’s wild!” Elizabeth shook her head in wonder. New vistas of Nature and its marvelous mechanisms were opening up absorbingly, though the occasion was dismal.

Wanda Lindstrom was not through. “You can see that this process can control a colony in several ways. When one worker feels hunger or thirst, he is feeling pretty much what every other member of the society is feeling, and vice versa. Also, this common feeding helps transfer the various pheromones, meaning that all the individuals keep getting the same message.”

Hubbard laughed from his seat. “Without room for misunderstanding!”

Amos Tarbell did not laugh. “My God, we’re not up against cockroaches, we’re up against a monster!”

Hubbard grew serious at once. “You’re right, Amos! When the insects all get to doing their automatic jobs, you’re talking about a fearsome machine. The fact is that insects do form superorganisms even more cunning—to be anthropomorphic for a moment—even more cunning than larger, vertebrate animals. You may be surprised to learn that termite nests are much more intricate than mammals make or even birds design. I myself have seen ant hills in the Serengeti as high as a man. For air-­conditioning in the African climate, the termites or ants build two towers, one to draw cool air down into the nest, the other to discharge the warm air. And they have specialized workers whose only job is to beat their wings to keep the air circulating!”

“Man!” exclaimed Russell Homer, “I’d have got down off that tree a helluva lot faster if I’d known half of this before!”