Yes, even brick and slab homes have wooden frames, studs, headers and other wood products.
No; however for every swarming termite you see, there are many workers that will eat your home.
Yes. You need to make sure that you don’t put the mulch above the slab. Remember, wood chips are termite food and it will attract termites.
Termites can come through a 1/64 inch crack in a slab, so a cracked slab or an expansion crack is big enough for a termite to come through and infest the wood above the slab. They can also come up any plumbing pipes on electrical conduits that penetrate the slab.
No. Formosan termites have been known to attack 47 species of live plants and trees, including citrus, wild cherry, cherry laurel, sweet gum, cedar, willow, wax myrtle, Chinese elm and oak to name a few. Formosan termites feed on both spring growth and summer growth wood. They have also been known to eat through non-cellulose material such as thin sheets of soft metal (lead or copper), asphalt, creosote, rubber and plastic, searching for food and moisture.
A native subterranean termite colony can have from 250,000 to a million termites in it. A Formosan colony can have upwards of 10,000,000 termites in it.
They say you can have from 7 to 10 colonies per acre of land.
Termites were here many years before we built all these big subdivisions. When a dead tree falls in the forest, termites eat the cellulose and return it to the soil for other plant life to grow.