Termites Pest Control

Termite Life Cycle

A mated pair of winged adults will form a new colony once they drop the wings and enter a structure through cracks or crevices in March through June of each year. The wings are longer than the body, a sure sign that they are not ants. They look for bare wood and then create a chamber, where they then mate and raise their brood. Eggs hatch in about 2 ½ months and become nymphs, false workers, or soldiers. Nymphs can quickly take care of themselves, and will also tend to the queen and king. The false workers will obtain food and tend the nest, while the soldiers, which have larger heads, defend the nest from invaders. There is no true worker caste. A queen can live for 15 years, during which the colony may grow to thousands of nymphs. A single structure can also be host to multiple colonies.

Termites are social insects that build large nests in soil, or wood and can cause damage to wooden structures. They are sometimes improperly called 'white ants'. Several hundred to several million termites live together in one family. Their main goal is to work together in an organized system to find and use cellulose food source to produce a bigger colony. Within the colony, there are specialized members of the workers, the soldiers, the alates (reproductive males and females), the queen, king, and the nursery termites.

Most workers have light-colored bodies and rarely grow more than 10mm long. They are like a grain of rice. They forage for food all day and all night. They rarely leave the dark tunnels that run from the colony through the soil and into the wooden frames of buildings.