Word: formosans
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...Guest House on Thursday, where they exchanged gifts. Chen unfurled an elaborate scroll painting of a horse - the meaning of "Ma" in Chinese - and Ma gave Chen a ceramic vase with painted Taiwanese orchids. In the coming months, they'll also exchange furry ambassadors: two Chinese pandas for a Formosan serow and sika deer...
Termites are a homeowner's nightmare under the best of circumstances. But what Patrick saw in his bathroom ceiling that day were not just any termites. They were Formosan termites--the most voracious, aggressive and devious of over 2,000 termite species known to science. Formosan termites can chew their way through beams and plywood nine times as fast as their more laid-back cousins. Their colonies are huge, housing up to 10 million insects. They nest underground, in trees, in walls--just about anywhere there's wood and water. And they're on the move: long confined...
...should have happened years ago. Formosan termites first arrived on the mainland U.S. just after World War II, experts believe, carried from Far Eastern ports in planks or packing crates by military cargo ships. For decades, nobody worried much about them, thanks largely to powerful pesticides that drove them away from houses. But the termites simply turned their attention to nearby trees, where they thrived largely unnoticed...
...late 1980s, though, the EPA banned the so-called organochlorine pesticides as being too toxic. That left termite fighters with a badly weakened arsenal. Even then, Formosan termites might have been controlled with an all-out effort, but few experts understood how grave the problem really was. (One exception, according to a multipart series on the termite threat that appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune last week, was Louisiana State University entomologist Jeffery LaFage; tragically, he was killed in a robbery just as he was rallying support for a termite-treatment program in the French Quarter a decade...
...chemical was applied last week; in a month, Terminix will be back to see how well it has worked. If the bugs are gone, friends and family will pitch in to help repair the damage--a skill Patrick's father Virgil Beyers Sr. honed 20 years ago when Formosan termites nearly destroyed his house. With any luck, Kayla Beyers, 4, won't have to do it all over again two decades from...