Many people are not aware of the wood-boring potential of white ants and leave them untreated until they cause significant damage, so it is essential to treat light infestations to avoid problems.
What Should I Do When I Find White Ants? When you find white ants, you should maintain darkness, avoid disturbance, remove timber and tree stumps, and make chemical barriers around the house. Use effective termite baits, drown them in vinegar and lemon solution, and expose them to sunlight. You can also use salt and water solution, spray neem or tea tree oil and borax solution, and call professional exterminators.
White ants can severely damage buildings if left unaddressed for a long time, as these insects eat cellulose material after invading wooden structures.
So, it is better to deal with their population quickly if you find mud tubes, hollow woods, wood tunnels, and piles of wings close to wooden material.
Maintain darkness and avoid disturbance
It is better to maintain darkness in a particular area where you have found an infestation of white ants because they begin to react aggressively to light.
They can close entry holes after detecting the threat in their surroundings when you try to move an infested wood to a different location outdoors.
Any disturbance to their habitat can also pose a risk of spread as they quickly abandon their nest and move to other areas after detecting a threat to their lives.
It becomes challenging for the pest controllers to deal with them because they can hide somewhere else indoors and do not become visible until you see mud tubes or hollow wood.
Accordingly, avoid disturbing their nests if you do not find ways to deal with their colony, and contact professional exterminators to kill them permanently.
Remove timber and tree stumps
White ants or termites are wood-boring insects that prefer to live in wooden logs, tree stumps, and wooden furniture outdoors and indoors.
After finding them living in your house, you have to remove possible nesting spots of these insects to reduce the risk of spread until extermination.
Look for possible wooden structures outdoors and remove timber or tree stumps. Covering the area with thick tape if you have unintentionally disturbed their nests is essential.
Accordingly, making a boundary of thick tape helps keep them restricted to an infestation area and avoid their spread to different regions of the house.
Exposure to sunlight
Termites prefer to live in a dark or moist environment and avoid direct exposure to sunlight, as high temperatures kill them. They start moving towards a darker place after finding the light.
These cold-blooded insects have less tolerance to temperature fluctuations and die when exposed to extreme heat. High temperature leads to the evaporation of moisture from their bodies.
Accordingly, you can put the wooden logs or other infested pieces of wood in direct sunlight during hot days to make them die quickly.
However, you have to be careful while shifting it to sunny areas because they begin to run in different directions after feeling jerks or disturbances in their nests.
Make chemical barriers around the house
You can create chemical barriers around the infested area using termiticides like hexaflumuron and fipronil because these chemicals can kill them on contact.
You can also apply them around the building perimeter to keep them from reaching indoors. In addition, the boric acid powder also works well if you spread it around the infestation.
Boric acid kills the white ants as it causes digestion problems once ingested, even in smaller quantities, so that you can create a boundary with the powder.
Similarly, you can prepare a spray of borax or boric acid directly on the infestation after mixing it in a suitable amount of water.
So, it can lead to the death of the whole colony when you spray infested dry wood colony, but it is better to wear gloves and goggles while spraying the solution.
Use effective termite baits
White ants are destructive as they can make wooden furniture hollow from the inside by chewing wood because they get nutrition from wood materials.
It becomes essential to look for some effective baits and get rid of these nuisance pests from home that can create a bigger problem if not handled properly.
Put the bait stations close to the infestation and let them do their work. It can be a slow killing process but has long-term effects against white ant infestations.
Moreover, it targets all the castes in a colony, including workers, soldiers, and reproductive males and females, that are pretty hard to kill with other methods.
Put a wet cardboard
You can play a trick with white ants after finding them indoors by getting benefits from their behavior of getting attracted to moist places where they can find food.
Accordingly, you can put a cardboard piece in outdoor areas and make it wet by spraying water but avoid over-wetting. They are supposed to be drawn towards wet cellulose in a short time.
It feels like a buffet to these pests providing food and moisture. You have to be patient and let most of them come out and reach this cardboard bait.
After that, you can burn the cardboard to kill them at once and repeat the process until you find no termites attracted to the bait.
Drowning in vinegar and lemon solution
Vinegar contains acetic acid that can be corrosive to the exoskeleton of insects and kills them. You have to prepare a solution by diluting the vinegar in water in equal amounts.
Add lemon juice into the white vinegar solution and pour or spray the solution deep into their nests so that it reaches every minor groove and narrow tunnel.
Moreover, orange juice can also replace lemons in this remedy because they are acidic and improve the effectiveness of vinegar.
Spray neem or tea tree oil
Termites do not like strong odors and hate the smell of neem and tea tree oil, which can be used as deadly killing substances.
You can spray neem oil on infested wood pieces by mixing it in water and letting them chew the wood, leading to their death. You can mix it with soap and water to make it more effective.
In addition, tea tree oil also has killing properties against white ants because it alters the hormonal systems of the insects.
It affects their dietary and reproductive needs, leading to lesser food consumption and reduced egg-laying potential. Reduced reproduction stops them from spreading and help in their control.
Use salt and water solution
Termites need moisture to keep their bodies hydrated, as water loss can cause severe dehydration and pose a risk of death. Their exoskeleton begins to get hard and fall off their bodies.
Accordingly, you can use a solution of salt and water because salt causes dehydration and pulls locked moisture from bodies. Prepare salty water by mixing salt in warm water in a 1:1 ratio.
After that, spray the salty solution on these insects directly and drown their bodies entirely. It is not effective enough to kill the whole colony, but it can reduce the overall population.
Call professional exterminators
It is better to call professional termite exterminators after finding their colonies in the backyard, particularly when there is a heavy infestation.
These experienced and skilled people can handle the infestation in a better way without causing the risk of any further damage to your property, as amateur handling can lead to a worse spread.
Moreover, it is essential to call exterminators for an annual inspection of termites to avoid risks of uncontrollable infestation, as they check every possible spot of the house to avoid infestation.
In addition, you can get warranties for their services to call them for treatment of white ants if these destructive pests have attacked before their claimed time duration.
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