Here it is, April, the month when I feel duty-bound to warn my fellow homeowners about termites and termite-killing companies. What’s so special about April, you ask? Well, April is when the termites that have been eating your house for who-knows-how-long let you know that they’ve been eating your house.
In our part of the world, April is when termites swarm. A termite swarm isn’t at all like an everyday termite infestation. An infestation is subtle—it’s little bugs quietly building mud tunnels up from the ground to the wood that holds up your house, then eating that wood one tiny mouthful at a time. Most likely, you won’t notice a termite infestation.
A termite swarm, though, is unmistakable, like a biblical plague. One minute, you’re sitting at the table having breakfast, minding your own business. The next minute, a few thousand winged black termites come flying out of your baseboards and window trim, heading for daylight. They land in your hair, on your tables and chairs, your beds and pillows, your cats and dogs. You know when your house has been swarmed.
Here’s the good news: termite swarmers can’t hurt you. They don’t bite and they don’t sting. The ones that make it outside fly off and start a new colony. The ones that get stuck in your house lie down and die from exhaustion. Just suck them up with your vacuum cleaner and throw away the bag.
There’s a chance your swarm could be an ant swarm instead of a termite swarm. Look here to see the difference: terminix.com/services/termite/ter mite-or-ant/ .
A termite swarm isn’t a 100 percent guarantee that termites are eating your house—but it’s about a 99 percent guarantee. Usually, swarmers in your house mean there are workers chewing on your floor framing, and those workers have been eating your house for at least a few years. If you get swarmers, call your bug man. If you don’t have a bug man, that explains how those worker termites went unnoticed for a few years.
Now, with no offense meant to honest, hard-working bug men, bug women or bug dogs, you homeowners need to know: there are some bug-killing companies that will just plain rip you off. Here’s how I know: after about 20 years of inspecting houses, I have seen hundreds of houses that were supposedly inspected every year by licensed, qualified and highly trained bug men. Yet those houses were infested with termite tubes, supported by floor joists that were more termite poop than wood, and obviously hadn’t been treated or repaired in decades.
The most egregious example was a house that had been “under a termite contract” for 30 years. The house got its regular yearly inspections, and the inspector blessed the house each year. The cellar under the house was easily accessible. Co-inspector Rick (who’s 6-foot-4) and I could stand up in it. Even so, the floor framing was so chewed up, so rotten, so weak that the house had started to move, cracking floor tiles and wallboard all through the house.
The company that “protected” this house was one of the biggest bug companies on earth. Truth be told, of the seriously eaten-up houses I’ve seen, most were under contract to high-profile, nationally-known bug companies.
Maybe it’s just me, but I decided a while back that in Middle Tennessee, the small local bug companies do a better job than the big outfits. This fits in with my rule that you shouldn’t hire anybody you wouldn’t run into at Kroger.
While I’m thinking about it, there’s a corollary to that rule. If you’re interviewing a person to work on your house and that person peppers the conversation with how much he loves the Lord, run like the Devil. I could fill up a Metro bus with customers of mine who got swindled by folks who swore they were heaven-bound. And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
Anyhow, those of you who are plagued by termites—or are about to be—stick with a good local bug outfit with good references. Crawling under houses looking for bugs and bug damage is a hellish job that involves slithering through toxic critter crap, getting bug poop in your hair, eyes and other orifices, and running across the occasional dead cat, angry possum or tail-up skunk. It’s a whole lot easier to just say you crawled through a crawl space than it is to actually crawl through a crawl space.
If you’re home when your bug man comes to do his inspection, I recommend that you grab a big-ass flashlight and a few garbage bags. After the bug man goes in the crawl space hole, put the garbage bags down on the ground just outside the hole, lie down on the bags, turn on your flashlight, and watch your bug man as he navigates the crawl space. That’ll motivate him to look in all the right places.
Finally, there’s this: we can never kill all the termites. Truth is, we probably don’t want to. Right now, there are scientists trying their best to load up termite intestines with bacteria that will make the termites fart out enormous amounts of hydrogen, which we can use for fuel. I am not making this up. Look here: eastbayexpress.com/2005-09-07/news/bug-juice/1.
