This is another common question about termites. What we want to do in this article is highlight the inherent misunderstanding in this question and address what you should actually do.
Answer: We don’t want to hide this halfway down the page. It’s too important to know this – if you have termites in your wall, you need to get a thorough pest inspection by the best pest inspector. Then you need to remediate the damage, destroy the termites and kill the colony.
What you need to understand is that termites rarely live in your home. They’ll have a nest in the vicinity or they’ll live underground. What your home is, is a nice big food source.
The other important thing you need to realise is, if you’ve seen some termites in your wall, they could be the tip of the iceberg. If you’ve seen any termites at all, you should assume they have lots of friends. We’ve seen way too many walls completely eaten away from the inside to underestimate these little terrors.
Termites are really good at hiding. In fact, many pest inspectors often miss termite activity in homes they’ve inspected. You’d be amazed how often termites are missed by (so-called) professionals. We’ve even written an article about what other pest inspectors missed. The point being that you might not just have termites in your wall. If you inspector didn’t lift carpets, didn’t crawl into the roofspace, didn’t crawl into the sub-floor, etc, then these places could also harbour termites. The point being, this article isn’t really about termites in your wall. It’s about termites, anywhere.
Below are few highlights from our article What Did Your Termite Inspector Miss? We’ve seen plenty of termites in walls that were overlooked by inept inspectors.
Getting back to the question, how do I get ride of termites in my wall? A better question would be, what do I do when I find termites in my wall. And the answer is:
Honestly, we could tell you so many tales of the things we’ve seen when people have “termites in the wall”. What appears to be a few termites can be anything from a few termites to a completely infested home.
Rather than bore you with details, let’s just look a a few images that tell the story themselves.
Those termites you may have seen in your home, they’re likely foraging for their colony. They can travel underground for 100s of metres, taking food back to their termite nest. They’ll continue to do that if you don’t do something about them. You need to protect your home from them and the best way of doing that is with a treatment that leads to colony collapse. If you don’t do that, they’ll always be there and your home will always be vulnerable.
We’ve written previously about termite barriers (which aren’t actually termite barriers, but you can read the article if you want to know more about that). The system we use, Trelona ATBS, attracts the termites and kills them with poison. But just like those termites eating timbers in your home, the ones that visit the bait stations are going to forage for food and take it back to the colony. Only this time they’re not taking yummy food back to the colony, they’re taking deadly bait for the colony to share.
This is how you kill the colony.
And this is also how you get rid of those termites in you wall. You get rid of all termite, including the ones you don’t see. Termites in your wall isn’t just a termites in your wall problem. Effective control of termites, including bait stations and monitoring, if the best way to get rid of all termites, including the ones in your walls.
