Which Is The Best Way To Eradicate Termites? The question of which is the best termite treatment? is a tricky one to resolve, because the reply relies partly on your point of view on the widespread use of chemicals. The debate on the usage of chemical pesticides has been going on since the Second World War and even before.
In the Forties and Fifties, many countries that had been involved in the fighting had grave bomb and shell damage, so the local governments took advantage of the clean-up to obliterate all the old inner city slums.
As they did so they observed plagues, simply plagues of bed bugs, cockroaches, rats and other pests, so they spread chemical killers such as DDT everywhere in large quantities. A similar process, for different reasons, was carried out in the United States.
This had the desired effect of destroying the pests, but there was already unease, that insects may become immune to these insecticides. The use of DDT was later banned. The qualms of those who worried about insects becoming resistant, were at least partly warranted and so the debate goes on on. In this article, we will look exclusively at: which is the best termite treatment.
There are three basic methods of termite control: fumigation, baiting and soil barriers
Fumigation involves the gassing of termites. A tent is built around the building in question and gas toxic to termites is pumped into your house from top to bottom and between the exterior walls and the tent.
This gas is then forced into every nook and cranny by fans and it is left there for about twenty-four hours. Then the tent is removed and the gas is extracted from the house by the same fans.
The treatment takes three days. You will move out on day one and back in on day three. The gas only kills termites, they say, so all your mice, spiders and cockroaches will be left unscathed. You will get a warranty that the house is free of all termites. However, some people are not enthusiastic about the idea of fumigating.
Baiting involves laying bait stations around the house and monitoring them for termite activity. This can be carried out by yourself or you can have a pest control firm do it for you. Once the wooden bait shows signs of termites, then the bait is poisoned.
The principle is that the poison is taken back to the colony where it is passed on the the others either by bodily contact or feeding. This process takes longer to eradicate a nest than the three days of fumigation.
Creating a soil barrier means exactly that, you poison the soil around and underneath your home, so that as soon as a subterranean species of termite burrows into your garden it is stopped dead. Quite literally and subterranean termites are the worst of the three kinds. However, a lot of people hesitate at the idea of poisoning hundreds of tons of earth just to kill termites.
So, the debate on the matter of: which is the best termite treatment? goes on. A lot of it centres on your gut feelings about chemicals, but at the end of the day, ‘you pays your money and you takes your choice’.