Termites Want to Eat Your House

Termites. Simply mentioning the word makes people cringe. Termites live in nearly every state in the union, they are very difficult to spot, and they want to eat your house.
So what is a homeowner to do? Once you know a little bit about termites, you can take some common sense steps to lower the likelihood that termites will start eating your home.
Approximately 1 in 3 houses in this area will be damagTermite-Damage-Infographiced to some degree by termites, so it’s fairly common. In fact, the total weight of all of the termites on Earth is estimated to be much greater that the total weight of all of the humans. Our ancient hominid ancestors are believed to have eaten them.
The kind of termite found in New England lives in the soil and eats anything containing cellulose, the building blocks of wood. Only the blind workers actually eat your house. They bring the wood back to the nest to feed the ever-hungry colony, and they are constantly foraging for a new food source.
These beige colored bugs about the size of a grain of rice, are most often found anywhere wood is in close proximity to the ground. They live in the soil and only leave the soil to eat. If they have to travel a short distance between the soil and the wood, they build “shelter tubes” (also called mud tunnels) which will look like brown veins about 1 cm wide traveling up your foundation wall.
They live in colonies ranging in size from 60,000 to 1.5 million. A colony of 250,000 can eat about one cubic foot of wood in a year. To reduce the likelihood of termites eating your home, keep the area around the house as light and dry as possible and maintain as much distance between any wood members attached to your house and the soil. It’s as simple as that.
Over time they can do some expensive structural damage. The problem is, it usually takes a trained eye to find them in your home, so if you’re concerned, contact us to do a full inspection of your property and inspect your home for damage.

Previous/Next
Tagged with: , , , , ,