Termite Infestations

This is a Pay Per Post ad. But I would have done it anyway, since it falls in line with my curiosity about insects.

Kill the Termites is an informational website about, well, termites, apparently hosted by someone interested in San Antonio termite control. The pedigree of the site is a bit murky. In any case, the site itself is not commercial in nature, but is quite informative.

Having owned houses here in San Diego, I've got quite a bit of experience with the little devils. In fact, my kung fu staff is currently infested with them! How embarassing. Every time I use it, little termite droppings pop out of the end. In San Diego, there is no dormant season for termites. The weather is mild and they can crunch away on your house all day long. My previous house, built in the 1950s, had such severe infestations that sections of several of the door frames had been eaten away to paper. You could touch them and they would just disintegrate as the termites had eaten everything behind the painted surface of the wood.

Termites. I hate these guys.
Kill the Termites teaches you a great deal about the nature and treatment of termites. The information is geared towards killing them instead of teaching you detailed bits of entomology.

Termites don't live on their own. They infest your house in colonies, organized similarly to a bee hive or an ant's nest. That affects the way you have to try to deal with them, because it's not just a matter of killing a bunch of them. You have to kill off the colony for the infestation to end.

Here's some information from the website that I learned the hard way.

A healthy colony can consume an entire foot of a two-by-four in just a few months. That doesn't sound so bad, but the extend of the harm depends on how it's distributed in your house - the termites don't eat the entire board, they tunnel around in them. It is tough to tell exactly how much it will cost you to repair it, because it can vary so much.

For me, the best part of the site is the information about the ways to kill the termites. When I treated, I simply used and extermination company recommended by my dad and they tented the house. I had no real idea of what methods were available. My purchase of the service was made in ignorance. The thing I like the most about Kill the Termites is that I can get information about all kinds of extermination methods in the same place. I wish they had done a table comparison of the methods. Right now you have to do that mentally as you read about each of the termite treatments.

The site also includes links to many other informative sites about both termites and termite treatments. Check it out for yourself if you've got termite problems. Right now, I need to go beat some termites out of my kung fu staff.