Termite Troubles

I hate termites. The idea of a little bug eating away at the wood in the walls of your home gives me the creeps! Not to mention how scary it is to learn that your home has had termites. How long have they been there? How much damage have they done? Is my house going to fall over? These are the first questions that ran through my mind when I first found out that our home had termites. Since that day I've learned a lot about termites. I will share what I have learned in the hopes that it will help out someone else out there. Termites live deep under a home, they can come in through a crack in the floor or walls of the basement. They drag mud up with them, the mud must stay wet for them to live. So usually where there are termites there is also a lot of mud. They can eat 5 lbs of wood a day. The Queen termite lives deep down in the soil - really deep anywhere from 50 to 100 ft below your house. Yes below your basement. From her nest deep below she spends the "worker" termites up to get food (wood) which they bring back down to her. The queen is very large. I was told she can be as big as a grown mans foot. (So gross!). Anyways spot killing the worker termites will not stop your termite problem, only move or repel them temporarily. In order for a termite treatment to be successful you must kill the queen. I met with a couple different termite treatment companies to get two bids and two different opinions (two opinions is always better than one). Most companies use a product called termidor. Termidor is mixed in between two to three hundred gallons of water and is applied to the foundation, almost creating a mote. The idea is to saturate the basement wall of your home. The chemical is also applied to the area where the active termites where found. For us it was in our basement bathroom wall. So the pest control company drilled several holes in our bathroom floor and poured the poison down there. The reason the treatment is done this way is so that the worker termites are exposed to the chemical as they go about their merry way. The chemical does not kill the termites instantly but it is rather a slow process. The chemical is meant to work slowly so that the worker termites get it on them and on the food and they take it right down to the queen. The chemical ruins her reproductive system so she can't produce anymore termites. The worker termites eventually die from the chemical (takes about two weeks) and then the queen starves because the worker termites are no longer bringing her food and she is so big she can't hardly move. Another interesting thing is that the queen uses pheromones to control the worker termites and tells them where to go. When my brother originally found the termites it was mid afternoon and by the evening when I was able to get away and go look at the damage I couldn't find a single termite. They are very sensitive to light etc. But the queen is not likely to send the workers back to the same spot at least for a while. I was also fascinated to learn that the same termite "nest" can infect several homes, not just ours. The pest control guys said that a lot of time several home may have termites but its usually the home that discovers them first that will treat them for everybody.

I did this little illustration to show just how deep down the termite queen is. This picture IS to scale so this is how far down they may have gone in relation to our house. This whole experience has been so fascinating to me. But I really hope we never have to deal with termites again! Here is a website that has much more information in termites: http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef604.asp

My New Job - Holding Paper

My son found his passion today - cutting paper with my scrap booking scissors. The only down side to this is that it take both hands for him to run the scissors so he has me hold the paper. I've been holding paper for almost every free minute, all day :(. Haha silly boy it's painful to watch honestly - just because its so hard for him to work the scissors (it requires using both his chubby little hands).