Donvale is a pleasant leafy suburb. But less leafy than in the past, since until the 1960’s it was an orchard area. Today’s leafy trees tend to be 20-30 year old planted non-indigenous eucalypts. These ‘softer’ hardwoods make ideal nesting for our secretive enemy, “Coptotermes frenchi”, a tree nesting termite that is highly damaging in buildings but is discrete by habit. This is our focus in the Donvale / Doncaster areas because this is the pest invading homes in that area – surprise termites.
But we get caught out!
Sometimes we run a baiting program in a home, feeding the invading Cops’ frenchi with termite bait. For termite control, we observe and record the gradual demise on the infesting colony gradually over a few months until, finally we win and they lose. Every one of them dies. Phew, we can relax again, and just follow our procedure of follow-up checks ….. just in case.
Well, it is a good thing we do that!
Have a look at the photos of our ‘finished’ bait stations in a home in Donvale. We had completed a baiting program on Cops’ frenchi, but once they were gone a new species moved in and infested exactly the same workings, including the now vacant bait stations. Yes- it is “Nasutitemes dixoni”. You can distinguish it from Nas’ exiteosus (which we see more on in country Victoria) by the chubby abdomens typical on these chocolate brown ‘white ants’.
So what should we do for effective termite treatment?
The non-aggressive Nasute termites should not be there! In our chemical soil treatments, the termites must follow the disused mud leads of the dead Coptotermes colony and find themselves in our bait stations. Well, the reality is that we can’t just leave these Nasutes- we must poison them with baits as well.
This is not easy nor quick! Nasutes tend to be light feeders on termite bait and take a long time to acquire a toxic level in their colony. It can take many months of painstaking work to carefully keep bait feeding going long enough to destroy a Nasute colony. The process usually ends up with success, but not in terms of our costings which inevitably result in us losing. We can think of it as a lose / lose situation for the Nasutes and for us! Never mind- we like providing termite treatment in Melbourne suburbs like Donvale and love detecting those tree nesting ‘frenchi’ and helping you clear your property from them!
