Termite Baiting

This is where the big advances have been made in the last few years. Termites have traditionally been difficult to poison. They are very perceptive at picking a poison in their food at incredibly low concentrations. Attempts by the scientists to lace blocks of wood or cardboard with poisons like arsenic or boron were rejected by termites. We had to resort to "luring" methods of attracting large numbers of termites to untreated wood or cardboard, and then blowing a dust toxicant onto the (uncooperative) termites hoping that enough would be transported into the central colony to kill the queen. The process was difficult to perform, and while the results could be reasonable for a few specialists practiced in this art, they never approached the "sure-fire" result we all dreamed about.

Well, enter the termite bait. The trick was in using a non-repellant hormone. It was the Americans that worked this one out and they have produced termite baits that are both attractive and deadly to termites. Fantastic.

See termite baits in action

Termite baits are highly effective at colony elimination and have transformed our industry.

Termite baits stations provide a means to collect samples for species identification, and monitor termite activity in addition to assisting in termite control. Termite bait stations consist of containers of cellulose materials such as timber and paper which are either buried in the ground near the building under attack or carefully placed inside near known damage. Bait toxins must be undetectable. For this reason permethrin is not suitable as it is strongly repellent. Care must be taken not to cross contaminate baits with even tiny residues of other pesticides. As this method of control does not isolate the building from the colony, termites are still able to access the structure and baits are not ideal for long-term structural protection.

Applying baits to termite infected timbers

Specialist Termite Control gets best results when termite baits are placed directly on top of live termites infesting a building. We only place baits where live termites are seen on the day- never where they "might be" or "were last week". Provided termites remain active in a known accessible spot in an infested building, it is virtually "sure-fire" that a baiting program will eliminate the colony. The time span involved tends to be surprisingly variable, but 5 months is about normal, with a few jobs going over a year.

Baiting this way has the bonus of being sure that we kill the "right " colony, although even these magic baits wont prevent another colony from attacking the building in the future. Accordingly a successful baiting program should be followed with some on-going management such as inspections plus termite monitoring or chemical protection.(see below)

Bait box on exposed roof beam

A wonderful benefit of having the new generation of highly effective termite baits is that infested buildings that would not respond to a chemical soil treatment because of design issues, can be treated with termite baits. The result is that the pressure comes off chemical treatments and nowadays we only use chemicals to protect buildings that are designed in a way that can be protected in a quality way.

Two major brands are now available in Australia, details of which are on their web sites.

• Link to Exterra Termite Baiting
• Link to Sentricon II Termite Baiting