Knowing how to keep pest populations from forming on your property in the first place is a huge part of pest control. With termites, you're not likely to notice termite activity until it’s caused irreparable damage to your property, which makes early prevention even more crucial. That requires learning all you can about termite season and what it means for your yard.
Understanding Termite Season?
Termites can remain active all year long thanks to their subterranean lifestyles and penchant for infesting human structures. However, termite season refers to the time of year when the reproductive alates, or swarmers, are seeking out land to form colonies on. Termites, like ants, have a caste colony system, dividing work up between workers, soldiers, and swarmers. During warmer months, from spring to early fall, flying termites emerge from their mounds and tunnels to fly hundreds of miles. They look for loose soils near accessible wood, which human properties tend to provide plenty of. Swarmers are the only termites that fly and the only ones that can reproduce, so it falls to them to become the mating queens of each new termite colony. That’s why spotting termite swarmers, and fortifying your yard against them, is an important first step to avoid larger termite infestations.
The Damage Termites Cause
Termites are burrowing insects that form elaborate mounds or tunnels in the soil. Their burrowing ways can cause soil erosion and collapse the soil, but the real damage is what termites do to structural wood. Buildings provide termites with all the wood they could need to grow their numbers and mature into a colony that can produce its own swarmers. The tricky thing about termite damage is that it happens under the surface. The bugs spend their whole lives avoiding light, so they don’t burrow clean through structural wood. Instead, they hollow out the cores and leave a swiss-cheese-like pockmark of space throughout inner building materials. This is why termite damage can wind up costing property owners thousands to fix or replace, as entire walls and structures can collapse due to termite activity. It’s important to be on the lookout for swarmers since they are often the first and only sign that property owners receive that a colony is forming. It’s also important to curb the factors that make your property more likely to be picked by alates looking for ground to stake a claim to.
What Attracts Termites
Preparing for termite season isn’t just about watching for swarmers, it’s also about mitigating the factors that attract them to your property. Here are some things that termites look for and some ways you can address them:
- Moisture: Termites look for moist areas and some specifically eat waterlogged woods. That means addressing pools out in your yard and leaky pipes around your property are crucial.
- Soil contact: Anywhere that soil touches wood is a target for termites, including plants out in the yard and soil beds that touch exterior walls. Proper landscaping can help keep these things away from your property.
- Cracks & holes: This applies more to colonies that have already formed outside, but can also apply to swarmers that might be able to gain access to interior walls this way. No crack or hole in your exterior should be treated as too small, so proper maintenance is important.
Termite Protection From Prewett Pest Control
Because of the serious and significant damage that they can cause, termites aren’t a pest you want to try and control all on your own. Termite season includes many months of the year, and it’s easy to fall behind on the things that are necessary to truly fortify against them. Rather than sweat it alone, turn instead to the professional services offered at Prewett Pest Control. Our trained staff can keep termite swarmers from settling on your property, and only proven solutions are guaranteed to truly eliminate existing termite colonies.
Don’t take any chances, get true termite protection from Prewett Pest Control.