this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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So just for fun...
Termites species vary widely in their eating speed. A rough average seems to be 0.5kg a year for a colony.
If it's an old house made of wood, because I think it's the only kind where this is theoretically viable, say it would contain roughly 20,000 kg.
That's going to take the colont 40,000 years. But that also means it could theoretically take 40,000 colonies 1 year.
Termite colonies that consume closest to 0.5kg/year are dry wood termites, which can have up to a few thousand individuals. Let's say 2000. In theory you would only need 80 million of them.
The average termite volume is roughly 12 cubic millimeters, and and the average car has roughly 3 billion cubic millimeters. This means you could fit ~230 million termites. This is almost 4x as much as you need, but 1 year is kind of long.
In theory you could load up 3 cars full or termites and eat up someone's house in a month if you really wanted to.
You could use a more aggressive species but really, they are just in larger numbers so you get diminishing returns on vehicle space. Either way you're going to need a lot more than 9000 termites
Edit: this would also produce a about 3 metric tons of termite poop if we estimate 15% of it comes out as poop.
Thank you for doing the maths on this one. It sounds like a single car load of termites could finish off a house in a little over 3 months. If we allow space for the driver, we'd be at around 4 months. Definitely long enough to really rub it in, and we wouldn't nedd the entire house eaten, just the structural bits.
Now, do you happen to know where I can hire a car full of termites? Asking for a 'friend'...
Realistically if it's a responsible homeowner just a handful of termites every couple weeks would be enough to cause them financial harm. Depending on your state it could be as little as 400 bucks to treat a small area of termites. If the homeowner is on top of it and treats whenever they see them that's 400 bucks every couple weeks pissed away, and it can be significantly more to repair the wood if you don't want pin hole riddled fascia all over the place.
But how would you get all the termites to remain in the house instead of wandering off somewhere else?
Training. Lots of training. That's why I, I mean my friend, wants to hire them, I've no idea how you do that.