QUESTION:
What do termites look like in the wall?
ANSWER:
I won’t be able to give you too specific of an answer on this, but can speak generally. You are in California, so you have 3 choices of kinds of termites – drywoods, subterranean, and even dampwood termites if there is a serious moisture problem. Drywoods are common in much of California and other regions of the U.S., and the normal evidence of these termites is going to be their fecal material. These tiny pellets have a very distinctive shape to them, regardless of the varying color from tan to black to reddish. No other insect has a fecal pellet of the same shape, which is egg-shaped but with distinct depressions in them running front to back. You will need good magnification to verify this shape and appearance but that is what is needed and the proper ID is oh so important.
Drywood termites are fastidious housekeepers, pushing all their unwanted………uh, “debris” out of their galleries. They do so by chewing a “kick hole” to the outside, pushing the junk out, and then sealing that hole closed again. This then causes an increasingly large pile of the fecal material below that point, perhaps on a window sill, a floor, within a wall, or often in the attic. Unless you physically tear open the wood you are just not going to see the termites themselves.
Subterranean termites also create visible evidence of their presence, and this is the mud tubing they build to travel within. These termites are much more susceptible to desiccation and maintain their moist environment by building mud tubes and staying within them. Whenever they cannot go directly into the wood, such as from soil over a pier block and to the subflooring, they make the mud tubes. This is commonly seen on foundations in crawl spaces or up the side of an interior wall from the slab below. If you poke a tiny hole in that tubing you will probably see a few small white termites quite quickly, as they come to that hole to investigate and to seal it closed again.
So, you rarely really look for the termites themselves initially, but for the evidence of tubing or pellets they will leave in exposed areas.
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