If this is your first encounter with a termite treatment in South Jersey, you should become acquainted with a term used by entomologists and pest control operators.
The term is POST-TREATMENT SWARM and this is what it means to you:
Termites may swarm several weeks after even the most thorough treatment has been rendered to your home. This should not cause undue alarm, but it would help if you understood how and why it happens.
If you look at termite advertising, you will notice that the professionals say TERMITE CONTROL rather than TERMITE EXTERMINATION.
This is done because the principles involved in eliminating termites from your home are quite unlike those used for any other insect.
Your pest control operator made a chemical barrier in the soil around your home. Its purpose is to make it impossible for termites to travel back and forth from the soil to the timbers in your home.
Termites carry moist soil to the wood to keep the moisture-sensitive WORKERS healthy. Once the treatment has been made, the termites can no longer humidify their galleries and they start to die.
The control is complete when the wood dries out to the point where the humidity is so low that termites cannot survive. In some homes, this takes place rapidly and in others, it may take several weeks.
Fortunately, the destructive WORKERS die considerably before the nondestructive SWARMERS.
Nature has endowed the SWARMERS with the ability to withstand much drier environments than the WORKERS – this is because the SWARMERS must come out into the open to reproduce. Therefore, their bodies have been adapted so they can survive in a dry atmosphere. The WORKERS, on the other hand, never come out into the open because the humidity is too low for their survival.
So, if you should have a POST-TREATMENT SWARM, don’t feel that the treatment was unsuccessful. Termite control takes a number of weeks for complete results because it is dependent upon the drying out of the wooden structures in your home.
If you have additional questions about your Termite Treatment – give us a call!