Last summer, Dave Gordon was pulling some old paneling off a wall in his home recording studio when he discovered telltale signs that invaders had gotten there first.
“They had built these little sandy tunnels on the wall behind the paneling,” says Gordon, who lives in a West Rogers Park Tudor-style house with his wife, Marcia Waller, and their two children. He recognized the tunnels as part of a termite colony’s feeding network, the pathways through which worker termites ferry food from wood sources down into the soil, where the colony lives.
The house had been professionally inspected just over a year before, when Gordon and Waller bought it, but no signs of termites had turned up then. “That’s the tricky thing about termites,” Gordon says he has learned. “They work from the inside out, and sometimes you don’t even know they’re there until they do some serious damage. We were lucky; if I hadn’t been pulling down that paneling, we might not have found them for a long time.”
Gordon called an exterminator, Tech-1 Pest Control in Chicago, the night he found the tunnels. The next week, a crew came out to drill dozens of holes through the studio’s cement floor and dig a narrow trench all the way around the perimeter of the house. Into the holes and the trench went a termite-icide, to both kill the termites that were present and create a barrier so any other colonies nearby couldn’t move in.
Although termites are nowhere near as great a threat in the Midwest as they are in warmer climates to our south, they are capable of working havoc on the structures they invade. “Over time, termites can take a wood beam or a floor joist and devastate it,” says Scott Kaufman, a Tech-1 vice president. “They’ll buzz through it to feed their colony.”
Carpenter ants, the other wood-destroying insect that is common here, can also do damage, but Kaufman says they’re more likely a sign that wood was already damaged. “Carpenter ants don’t eat wood, they use it to make their nests,” he explains. “They want soft wood, so they go inside a tree where there’s dead wood, or around a water leak in a basement where the wood has been softened.”
And while tree-dwelling termites plague some southern sections of the country, local experts say that it’s usually only carpenter ants that are found in our trees. “Our termites are subterranean–they live underground below the frost line, which means they can be active all year,” says Cliff Kapson, owner of the Glenview firm Envirospec, which specializes in examining homes for signs of pest infestation.
Termites leave their calling card in the form of tiny mud tunnels about one-eighth of an inch high, like the ones Gordon found on his wall. “They come up into a house through cracks in the foundation, or any other small opening they find,” Kapson says, “and they have to maintain their body moisture, so they make these shelter tubes. Then they crawl back and forth through them, bringing back wood one grain at a time to the colony.”
Scrape away the shelter tube, Kapson says, and you might see the workers scurrying back and forth. Gordon did that and wasn’t repulsed by what he saw. “It was kind of exciting,” he says.
Carpenter ants are evident from their “dump piles” of very fine sawdust at the base of a tree or on its limbs, says Rex Bastian, vice president for technical services at Hendricksen The Care of Trees, a Wheeling-based firm. “Carpenter ants don’t consume wood, they eat insects and other living food,” Bastian says. “They are just using the wood to live in, and what they like to tunnel in is soft, decayed wood in a tree or a structure.”
Treating a tree with carpenter ants often means removing branches that are structurally unsound–more likely, because of the dead wood that attracted the ants than because of the ants’ work itself, Bastian says. Kaufman recommends that houses near trees that harbor carpenter ants be professionally sprayed inside and out to prevent the ants from entering the house in search of food.
If they’re found nesting indoors, though, a pest control firm should destroy the nest, Kaufman says.
Getting rid of subterranean termites entails drilling holes in the floor through which the termite-killing compound can be sprayed into the soil, and digging a trench around the house in order to put in a barrier of the same compound. Kaufman says the spray is odorless and minimally toxic, and that besides, “it’s injected into the soil, where humans can’t get to it to ingest it.”
Afterward, holes in the floor are plugged with a matching material–wood dowels, for example, or poured concrete.
In this region, termites are most prevalent in city neighborhoods, probably for the simple reason that houses are closer together than in the suburbs, Kapson says. “If they get sprayed out of one house, they can try another one close by,” he says. That’s why people whose neighbors have had termites ought to get their own houses inspected for the pests at least once a year.
Treating for termites is elaborate and costly, but Kapson, the inspector, advises against using over-the-counter remedies to cut costs.
“You have to be sure the colony has been completely eliminated, and you want a complete barrier against any new colonies coming in,” he says. “I wouldn’t fool around with sprays from the hardware store.”
A gap of one-sixteenth of an inch in the barrier around the house is big enough to allow a later infestation, he says.
Gordon agrees. The total cost to rid his home of termites, he says, was “more than a grand. We hadn’t been planning to spend that money, but after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the house, we felt it was worth it to get them eradicated.”
