Today’s question: how do termite bait stations actually work, and what do we do with them?
A bait station usually starts life as a monitoring station. You take a piece of wood, or any cellulose, put it in a small plastic tube, and bury it in the ground around the house. Here’s why that spot matters: termites do most of their foraging in the top foot or so of soil. Think about a tree falling in the woods. It lands on top of the ground, not buried underneath it, so that’s where termites go looking for wood. Can they go deeper? Sure. Do they normally? No, not unless it’s too cold up top.
Once a station shows activity, the wood gets swapped out for actual termite bait. The termites keep feeding in that spot, carry the bait back, and it takes down the colony.
One thing most people don’t know: bait stations are for subterranean termites, the ones that live in the ground. Drywood termites live inside the wood and never come down to the soil, so a station in the yard will never see them.
Why we don’t stop at bait stations
When termite baits first came out, I was thrilled. They worked so much better than the termiticides we had back then. But there was a real gap. Stations usually go in 10 to 20 feet apart around the house, and a colony can work the ground in between without ever finding one, doing real damage before it gets caught.
So we do it a bit differently. We dig a small trench, four to six inches wide and deep, around the perimeter of the home, and put a liquid termiticide in before we backfill it. We use two different termiticides at once, to cover as much ground as possible and kill the whole colony.
We still monitor
We don’t skip the monitoring piece either. We still put stations in, sometimes with an active bait in them, and we come back every few months to check. If we find activity, we boost that specific area, because it tells us there’s more termite pressure there. That doesn’t mean termites are in your house. It means we caught it early enough to keep it that way.
Is monitoring strictly necessary if nothing’s in the house? Probably not. But it’s how we catch pressure before it ever becomes a problem, instead of finding out the hard way.
Want to see how this fits with everything else? Here’s every termite treatment option, explained straight. Or read about subterranean termite treatment in Clearwater, or what yearly termite protection actually costs.
If you have a question about this or anything else, give us a call at 727-462-0400, or text us at 727-458-7900. As long as GOD keeps making them, we’ll keep killing them. You have a great day.