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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ben’s pest control podcast. My name is Ben Sell and I’m the owner of Ben’s pest control here in Port St. Lucie, Florida. And today, I want to talk about Formosan termites. Now, I know that I’ve done other episodes on Formosan termite. And this one’s a little different. I tried very hard not to ever be an alarmist. And even though I’ve been in the industry, 28 years, I’ve seen some very, very serious termite damage. And I’ve been able to witness houses that are, are really completely tore up. And I try to do my best to not use that as a scare tactic for people. And I think for the most part, my company and I we do that we do pretty good at that is trying to tell people that yes, this is a serious thing. Maybe you don’t have them right now, but you just got to be ever present. Not ever present. But you have to be on on the watch forum. And you have to be thinking, especially if you know they’re in your neighborhood. Now, I’m going to give you an example. We have a community here. And in St. Lucie called River Place. In my opinion, it’s a very nice community. There’s some absolutely gorgeous homes and river places that I have inspected over the years. And going back to last year, we started to have people call up and say they were having termite swarms. And we went out and collected some of the evidence and brought it back to our office and we were able to determine that River Place was starting to see Formosan termite swarms happen in their area. And I tell everybody Formosan termites are the most dangerous they, they do the most damage, and they are a very aggressive species of termites. Now, for today’s episode, as I mentioned, I’m kind of discussing River Park or I’m sorry, River Place. But I want to be very clear. We’ve also seen them and some of the earliest noted areas around ports in the sea were by us one and Prima Vista, and the area kind of to the northwest. And we’ve had calls as far as into Port St. Lucie on the west side of the river now, and just south of river place. And we’ve actually this year had swarms as far as into St. Andrews. But back to the swarms, we saw on RiverPlace I want to say we probably inspected about four houses that reported to us that they were seeing the swarms and we were able to go in and say yes, you are having the swarms. And in most cases, we didn’t feel like they were of a major impact because it’s in a lot of cases, we were only seeing them in some windows and door. In one case, we found them in a vent. I’m not sorry, not an event, but we found them in a toilet. That was right under one of the vents that went outside. So what I believe had happened is that they probably swarmed outside and that some of the termites had come through the vent. And when they found their way down the vent, they were right above the toilet. And when they fell out of the toilet, they landed or when they fell out of the vent, they landed right in the toilet. So again, not trying to be an alarmist, I’m just trying to explain to people that these are these are bad and they’re a problem and they are here and they’re going to get established and protecting your house is important because they caused a lot of damage. And so the just this week a few few days ago we got our first call from a lady and RiverPlace and she said I have termites and they’re in my house and I went out and took a look yesterday at her house and if you go to my Facebook or Instagram page you can see some pictures. She has damage from the floor all the way up to the ceiling in one of her bathrooms there’s a window above the shower and there are mud tubes on the wall.
There are on the outside they have the they have a window by the shower. The mud tubes are on the outside, they actually created mud tubes over the side of the Hardy board. And then another part of the house state where they came up near another bathroom. They started eating up the baseboards and a doorframe took closet and the damage appears at this point to be isolated to just two spots. But I want to say in the last six months, the amount of damage that they’ve caused, and the areas that they’ve gotten to are pretty extreme compared to other termites we see. And it’s just kind of surprising. And what I tell people is that we try not to be alarmist, but you need to know that you do have to take these things seriously. And you you have to be prepared, that you do have to protect your houses and, and you don’t want to have that high pressure sales guy in your face, throwing numbers at you and throwing this at you. But you do want to know that if you can protect your house before it gets to be a problem that you know, you want to do that. I do not know at this point in time how much damage that she may have on her walls. She is hoping that she can open up the one bathroom from the outside. And I told her, I don’t think she’s going to be able to do that she’s probably going to have to rip out the shower. Now, that’s just my belief, I told her she needs to contact the general contractor. But because they believe it’s a block wall, usually you can’t just tear out the block wall to get into the interior of a shower wall to fix it. So we do not know yet how much in damages she’s going to have. We just know we’re in the process right now of getting her hooked up to have a treatment. And in her case, we’re going to treat the entire structure. More than likely we’re going to do a full application in the walls where we know we’ve got the activity and try to get her squared away as quickly as possible before these things cause any more damage to her house. So again, this is Ben with Ben’s pest control, if you are concerned, or if you think you may have termites. If you’d like a free evaluation, we’ll be happy to do that. Please check out our website at WWW dot Ben’s pest stop is or give our office a call at 772-878-1972. And we’ll be happy to do one of our free 58 Point pest surveys and analysis for you and let you know what we think. All right. Thank you and have a great week.
