Termites - information and advice

[richey]

TERMITES


Termite soldiers usually have a darker head along with a yellowish body

It is almost impossible to get rid of termites by yourself –
don't risk your investment in your furniture, which can be completely ruined within just 1-2 weeks!

• they like it dark - that's why you rarely see them on surfaces. They will try build 'tunnels' created from earth or dust and crawl underneath, or build tunnels underneath tiles, plaster or in 'natural' passages that connect potential nests
• are rarely seen ON wood, as they prefer “hidden” locations like:
  • underneath plant pots (loving the coconut wood pellets the pots are often filled with)
  • behind your skirting boards (you will almost never see them crawling in a wardrobe!)
• will enter rooms through
  • draining holes on your terrace
  • cable pipes
  • drainage pipes under your sink or in the shower
  • hallway windows (often underneath the metal frame, building passages underneath tiles)
• the only visible routes are usually just a few dozen centimeters long
  • in corners of walls or on tile grooves
  • over leaves connecting plant pots ( = potential nests) with walls or 'holes' where they go underneath again
• shockingly flexible and FAST: they can move a complete colony within just a couple of hours. My personal experience was to water my plants on the balcony at 10pm at night …at 10am in the morning there was a 2m long, completed 'highway' covered by earth on my balcony and they had already transported hundreds of larvaes, eggs etc. underneath a wooden chair and started their work ...
• what they EAT: they love wood, especially timber; but they also damage paper, cloth, carpets and other cellulosic materials. Particles taken from soft plastics, plaster, rubber, and sealants such as silicone rubber and acrylics are often employed in construction.

More detailed information at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termite and
http://www.pattayadailynews.com/en/2010 ... festation/

During the last AGM, it was decided that any kind of termite infestation will receive our full attention this year to get rid of these buggers. Dates of regular, building-wide treatment will soon be announced here and on the notice board. Please inform the frontdesk if you want your condominium treated but are not sure whether you are here at that time.


(Storage room door frame somewhere in the US with fresh termite mud tubes - more pictures from the web at http://www.pestcontrolthailand.com/temp ... amages.php )

[richey]

Here are 2 very effective chalk sticks you can buy in every supermarket for a mere ~30 Baht made from a synthetic pyrethroid called Deltamethrin or Cypermethrin. You simply draw 2 lines crossing the ant's or termites' path and that usually gets rid of the infestation after a few hours. Sometimes, repeated treatment is required, especially if there is strong sunlight exposure.

[richey]

To illustrate the difficulty in detecting termites a bit -

We had a professional treatment company coming in for a first inspection, and they informed us that termites can even eat / bite their way through concrete!

We found an example right away.
In this picture of one of the building's hallway risers, can you spot the termite nest?


We scratched the surface with a pen, the 'cover' went up in dust, and here we go: you can see how irritated a worker termite is looking from the top corner of the damaged nest surface, to 'assess' what is going on… most probably, dozens of larvaes are breeding in tunnels underneath the surface, while others might have fallen down while damaging the nest's cover and will try to hide/build another nest, others might still be hidden deeper inside the porous bricks or even in tunnels crossing the cement fillings. Professional treatment with long-lasting effect definitely needed here…


Another example for the difficulty of finding out about termite nests. In this picture, you can see a very small spot (~ 2mm²) of termite excrement in the corner of a wooden wardrobe. Something like this is almost always just the (hardly enough) visible 'front door' of a much larger nest already deep inside the wood. It doesn't help to just remove this little 'bulge' or to spray it, but the whole nest has to be dug out... otherwise, the termites will continue to breed and dig tunnels to somewhere 'safe'. Often enough, opening up the 'front door' wide enough or taking out the wood will reveal a shockingly large nest that basically goes through the whole wardrobe (or a number of smaller colonies interconnected by pathways), usually at its backside, while the wooden front was still looking perfectly okay all the time..


Another shot of another wardrobe, here there is just a 0,5mm wide spot of excrements (upper left, inmidst the 'crack') and a very, very small 'wormhole' of about 1mm² in the lower third of the picture showing that something bad is going on beyond the surface.