Mar 18, 2012 – What To Do With All The Junk
QUESTION:
Will subterranean termites ever make kickholes?
ANSWER:
The word kick hole is pretty much reserved for drywood termites, and it refers to the tiny opening the worker termites create for the purpose of cleaning house. Periodically they decide their colony has too much junk in it, essentially their fecal pellets, and they need to make room for themselves. So, a hole is drilled to the outside world, all those fecal pellets are pushed out, and the hole is sealed closed again. This is a fortunate habit, as it is just about our only means for detecting the presence of these termites in a structure. The fecal pellets are very hard and dry and will fall straight down from that kick hole to land on whatever surface is below. On a hard surface they will bounce a bit, but over time little pyramids of the pellets will accumulate.
View past Ask Mr. Pest Control questions.
Will subterranean termites ever make kickholes?
ANSWER:
The word kick hole is pretty much reserved for drywood termites, and it refers to the tiny opening the worker termites create for the purpose of cleaning house. Periodically they decide their colony has too much junk in it, essentially their fecal pellets, and they need to make room for themselves. So, a hole is drilled to the outside world, all those fecal pellets are pushed out, and the hole is sealed closed again. This is a fortunate habit, as it is just about our only means for detecting the presence of these termites in a structure. The fecal pellets are very hard and dry and will fall straight down from that kick hole to land on whatever surface is below. On a hard surface they will bounce a bit, but over time little pyramids of the pellets will accumulate.
Drywood termites dispose of their pellets in this manner because they have already squeezed out all the water they possibly can, so now the pellets are just waste material. Subterranean termites live in a much damper environment, and constantly replace their body and environmental moisture with return trips to the soil. They do not create fecal "pellets", as it were, but instead will use their fecal material as part of the cement that holds all that mud tubing together. With abundant moisture their fecal matter is pretty wet, so they use it as some of the glue when constructing mud tubes. I once visited a home with a termite inspector where a previous company's inspector had mis-identified some fecal pellets as "subterranean termite fecal pellets", which of course do not exist. It turned out the material was fecal pellets of Indian Meal Moth, but this improper ID created some problems between the homeowner and the two companies involved.
So, subs definitely do drill out of the wood periodically to forage or to move over open surfaces, creating the mud tubes as they go so they can remain hidden and maintain the humidity they need in their colonies, but they do not dispose of waste materials in this manner. Likewise, dampwood termites create large fecal pellets similar to those of drywoods, but they store those pellets in extra chambers in the colony. Their pellets are larger, softer, and wetter than a drywood's, and would not be easily rejected from the colony.
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