Some Insects That (thankfully!) Don’t Live In Houghton
My brother lives in Tennessee, and back on April 5, 2026 he sent me these pictures and asked, “Are these termites?”
Now, I had never seen an actual termite before, since they don’t live in the northern parts of Michigan where I have spent most of my life. But, upon investigation, it became pretty clear that the answer to my brothers question was, “Yah, you betcha!” These are clearly “swarmers”, the winged males and females that a termite colony send out in the spring to mate and attempt to found a new colony.
Specifically, they are one of the species of Subterranean Termites, probably Reticulitermes_flavipes. If you live in the general vicinity of Tennessee, the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture has a nice document telling all about the termite species that occur in the state: https://utia.tennessee.edu/publications/wp-content/uploads/sites/269/2023/10/PB1344.pdf
One of my brother’s neighbors found these in great quantities in their bathtub, where they evidently appear every spring[1]. The swarmers all emerge at once, fly off, mate, and try to find a suitable environment to establish a nest. Once they are done with the flight portion of this process, they shed their wings because they are going to spend the rest of their lives underground.
We can see that these are certainly not some kind of ant, because they don’t have the narrow wasp waist that ants have. They also have all six legs nearly the same length with all their knees pointing in the same direction, unlike ants which generally have longer legs, with the hind legs significantly larger than the middle and forelegs.
In fact, termites are not closely related to ants at all. They are a lot more related to cockroaches, which don’t generally live as far north as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula either. Speaking of cockroaches, this is probably as good a time as any to haul out this next photo. I was in New Orleans for a technical conference a while ago, and while walking around the town for a bit, happened to see this enormous cockroach squashed on the sidewalk:
It was big, nearly the length of my little finger. It was pretty banged up, but Google Image Search gamely informs me that it is most likely Periplaneta americana. The common name is “American cockroach”, but it turns out that they are actually native to Africa and the Middle East. It’s just that they arrived in North America on ships pretty early on, and so people assumed that they were here all a long.
So anyway, that’s one of the advantages of our climate — a lot of common pests that almost everyone else in the country has to deal with routinely, simply don’t live in the UP. Many of these pests are fundamentally tropical creatures. And while they can get through fairly mild winters by taking refuge in our heated buildings, there are limits.
It probably wouldn’t take much of a temperature increase to let both the termites and the roaches invade the UP, though. According to this paper from 1973, termites are fairly common up to Detroit, Lansing, and Grand Rapids,[2] and were occasionally being found as far north as Traverse City. So, we are teetering on the edge here. And considering that we did start seeing a more cold-tolerant cockroach species around here in 2023, we should probably keep an eye out for termites, just in case.
[1] I am getting this second-hand, so I may have some of the details wrong, but what is apparently going on is that my brother’s neighbor gets these termite swarmers in his bathroom every year. He then calls an exterminator, who does . . . something (?) and claims that the termites are now gone. But that isn’t because of anything the exterminator did, but just a result of it no longer being swarming season. And then, because the actual root cause of the problem (the probably massive termite nest living underground next to the building) wasn’t actually touched, they swarm again the next spring. Lather, rinse, repeat. It sounds like a nice racket for the exterminator. At least up until the un-exterminated main termite nest finishes consuming the buildings support timbers and the whole thing comes crashing down.
[2] Interestingly, the demarcation line for the northern extent of termites (and probably cockroaches) in Michigan, also represents the line that about 90% of the human population of the state lives south of. So, the type of climate that humans prefer, is also the climate that roaches and termites prefer. Isn’t that special.