Eastern Subterranean Termite

• The workers are blind and soft-bodied: they cannot bear light or dry air, so they build mud tubes to cross exposed surfaces, and those tubes are the first sign of an infestation.
• It digests cellulose thanks to symbiotic protists housed in its gut, which it passes from one individual to another by exchanging fluids.
• A colony can keep several secondary kings and queens, which lets it survive even if the founding pair is removed.
• It does not digest cellulose by itself: it depends on symbiotic protists in its gut, a trait of the so-called lower termites.
• A mature colony has between 60,000 and several million workers and can last ten years; the soldiers make up only 1 or 2 % and cannot feed themselves.
• A colony gets through about five grams of wood a day, the equivalent of some thirty centimetres of a two-by-four a year.
• In the United States, treating and preventing subterranean termites costs some 2 billion dollars a year.
• It is regarded as native to the south-eastern United States and invasive in Canada, Europe and South America; what was called Reticulitermes santonensis in France turned out to be this same species.

Habitat & environment

Underground nests in damp soil close to wood; it builds mud tubes to reach the wood without losing moisture, and the colony spreads across satellite nests linked by tunnels

Litter / clutch size

The main queen lays between 5,000 and 10,000 eggs a day

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reticulitermes_flavipes

Best time: Spring, when the swarms of alates emerge after days of rain