Termite Control

Termites are on a mission—an eating mission

Eat. It’s all termites want to do. In the ecosystem, their role is to break down plant and wood material — good news in the forest, bad news in the neighborhood. Their trick is to tunnel from their underground colony through the soil to any source of cellulose (your home, for instance), which they devour from the inside out. You don’t even notice their work until structural timbers are severely damaged. And, as if your house weren’t enough, termites also consume fences, paper, furniture, cloth and books.

How much havoc does this round-the-clock eating machine wreak?

Every year in the United States:

• More than 5 million homes have some type of termite problem.
• About $5 billion in termite-related property damage occurs.
• Termite damage is more common than damage caused by storms, fires and earthquakes.
• The costs of termite damage are rarely covered by homeowner’s insurance.

That’s the termites’ mission. Now, what’s yours? One thing’s for sure, you can’t ignore termites and the damage they cause. You ’ve got to move quickly, but move smart.

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What Are Termites?

Like people, termites are social creatures that look out for their own. Unlike most people, they really will eat you out of house and home.

Termites live with several hundred to several million family members, all of whom work together in an organized system to find and use cellulose food sources to grow the colony. This cooperation is called “swarm intelligence” and it helps explain why termites are so successful. A typical colony includes these specialized members:

worker	Most termites are workers, with soft, light-colored bodies rarely more than 10 mm long, like grains of rice. They rarely leave the dark tunnels that run from the colony through the soil and into the wooden frames of buildings. Twenty-four hours a day, they forage for food, maintain the nest, and tend the queen and her brood. Juveniles, called nymphs, groom and feed one another and others in the colony.
soldier	Soldiers have long heads with powerful jaws and are responsible for defense, primarily against invading ants.
reproductive	Reproductive male and female termites develop wings and leave the parent colony in a swarm to mate and start new colonies.
queen	The queen is the largest colony member, up to 10 cm long, about the size of the space bar on your computer. She’s so big that if she needs to move, it requires several hundred workers pushing at once. She lays an egg every 15 seconds. If she dies, another reproductive takes her place.
Termites keep themselves so well hidden that your best chance to see one is during a reproductive swarm. The problem is that swarming termites look a lot like swarming ants. Here’s how to tell which insect you’re looking at:
Termite vs. Ant	Wings: On ants, the front pair is longer than the back and they don’t break off easily. On termites, they’re equal size and they do break off easily. Waists: Ants’ are narrow and pinched. Termites’ are thicker and less defined. Antennae: Ants’ are elbowed. Termites’ are straight.

Now you know what the enemy looks like and how its troops are organized. That’ll help you and your cellulose-rich real estate take a stand against swarm intelligence. But don’t do it alone. Call in your special forces.

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Where Are Termites?

There’s a whole city hiding underground. Because you can’t see the termite colony, it’s possible to pretend you don’t have a termite problem. But, visible or not, termites are real. In fact, they may be scurrying around under your feet right now.

Termites love a moist, temperature-stable environment. The soil under your yard is the ideal spot, below the frost line but above the water table and bedrock. In this hidden spot, worker termites:

• Build a nest for the colony, with rooms to accommodate reproductives, eggs and nymphs
• Create a vast network of pencil-width tunnels through the soil
• Constantly forage for food, up to 350 feet from the nest, with total foraging territory up to ½ acre

When any termite finds a food source, it leaves a pheromone scent trail to recruit other termites from the colony to the food source. This scent trail is part of the colony’s communication system.

As they forage, termites often have to cross something they can’t chew through — such as a concrete foundation — to reach an above-ground food source. To do so, they build mud tubes out of packed earth, saliva and bits of chewed cellulose to protect them from drying out or being attacked by ants. They also use this material to seal in moisture while they’re lunching inside lumber, and sometimes to create an above-ground colony.

A successful mature colony with a ready food source typically includes several thousand individual termites, but it can be as large as several million. Two to four years after a colony begins, reproductive swarmers set out to find mates, dig in to the ground and establish their own subcolonies. These new colonies may grow and thrive on their own, or eventually reunite with the main colony. A swarm increases the risk for every house in the neighborhood.

Termites aren’t cute to look at. But not seeing them can be even more frightening. You don’t know where they are. And you don’t know what they might be doing to the structural support of your home. Fortunately, there are ways to spy on foraging workers and strike back.

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