How Fast Termites Damage Your Home
Termites are a pest that cause a lot of damage to your home. They are sneaky and can go unnoticed for years. They can also destroy wooden structures. The length of time it takes to destroy a house depends on the amount of wood in your home and the size of your termite colony.
Termites have a complicated social structure that allows them to multiply and survive indefinitely. Typically, a colony is made up of workers and a queen. They will feed on wood and other organic materials, such as cellulose. They are about an eighth of an inch long. They can tunnel through drywall and paper coatings. They leave faint trace lines in the interior of the tunnel.
Termite colonies range in size from a few thousand to millions of individual termites. A new colony will start small at around fifty to one hundred termites. It will grow slowly over a few years, allowing it to reach a mature colony of around 60,000 termites.
The amount of wood that a termite colony will consume will vary depending on the species, the size of the colony, and the climate. The larger the colony, the more wood it will eat. In fact, a large colony can eat the same amount of wood that a moderate-sized colony can in a few months.
It will take a single termite about three hundred and forty-two years to eat through a one-thousand-square-foot home. That is a lot of wood for a termite to eat in a short amount of time.