Coral Gables Historical Archive
The Times
Thursday, March 9, 1961, page 68 (of 84)
The page
The text of this pageRead by computer from the scan, so some words may be wrong. The page picture is the original.
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TERMITES THRIVE IN PLEASANT They do about $100,000,000 worth of damage to our in their own quiet way—and they lik~
BY EDWARD R. SAMMIS YOUNG TOM JONES was quite pleased with the house he had just bought. The former owner had added many attractive touches, like the decorative tiles on the window sills. The thought of termites never entered the buyer's head until long after he had closed the deal and moved in. Then one day it occurred to him that perhaps he ought to have an inspection. The decorative tiles were the first thing to catch his inquiring eye. He pried them off and found in the wood beneath the telltale honeycombs. Did the tiles indicate the owner knew he had termites? Even if they did, there was nothing Jones could do about it, for the eastern state in which he lived had no laws to protect him against this kind of depreciation. It cost him $4,500 to put the house back in shape. Termites are a strange, determinedly destructive, highly organized form of insect life, often referred to mistakenly as "flying ants," and every year they cause about $100 million worth of damage to our houses. They are a serious threat in almost every part of the United States, with the exception of the northern sector of the Middle West. And even there, sad to say, they have recently begun to make their appearance, as for example, around Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Although exterminators offer an inspection service free of charge, most homeowners close their minds to termites and their sinister potential, hoping, as is only human, that "it won't happen to me." But the more you know about termites, the dimmer that hope becomes, especially for owners of new houses. Consider these facts: Termites prefer recently built houses. In the old days, houses were more often built of cedar or of cypress in the south or redwood on the west coast, all of them woods not particularly to the termites' taste. They do like woods of the pine family, used in so much of today's construction, especially new wood which has the sap still in it. Termites find new houses not only attractive but easy to invade because too many modern builders fail to take the proper precautions. Indeed, some practices, such as sweeping the leftover rubbish under the porch and covering it loosely with dirt, allowing wooden joists to come in direct contact with the ground without being treated, building cinder-block foundations or supports without sealing them off at the top, are all open invitations to termite invasion and subsequent destruction. The commonest termites are the subterranean type, and they are the hardest for the uninitiated owner to detect until they have done their damage. Living in colonies underground below the frost line, they gain access to the wood of a house by tunneling up inside the wooden joists. When this situation is not available to them, they construct their own tubes of chewed wood and earth. These, too, are usually invisible because they are often built in the fissures or cracks of foundations. It is only when they are forced to build over an obstruction or guard that the tubes can be seen. One veteran termite fighter said that in seventeen years of battling the insect, he had never encountered even one colony above ground. THE DESTRUCTIVE, continuous chewing of the wood is done by the workers—white, stunted, blind creatures who produce the food supply by converting wood cellulose into protein. They pass food back to the colony through long supply lines, maintained throughout at constant humidity and temperature through fungus supply, an amazing feat of insect engineering. With all the termites' destructiveness, their social order has a certain fascination. It is rigidly divided into three castes: the 36 Suburbia Today, March 1961