Termite Bait

Termite bait is a viable and effective option for eradication of these pests and their colonies. It works based on very simple premise: that the worker termites bring back food to the nests. While the workers are out foraging for food to feed the larvae and others in the nest, they will hopefully come across this bait. When they discover the baiting system, they believe it to be a source of food for the population. As they feed on the termite bait and bring it back to the others, they unwittingly aid technicians in their extermination work.

Effects of Termite Baiting Systems

The effect of the poison is to cause death and sterilization to multiple generations of pests in the colony. This type of treatment is very effective when it is done successfully. Getting workers to fall for the deceit and take the poison back to the nest is essential. If they do this, they are doing technicians often can't do: take the extermination all the way to the nest. The key here is for the worker termite to take the bait and deliver it back to the rest of the colony. While they are waiting for this part of the treatment to work, technicians typically supplement their efforts with toxic liquid termiticides to do what they can to limit any further damage to areas of the home already found to be actively infested.

Once a termite colony or the workers within that colony have been discovered feeding in a certain region of the home, professional exterminators can zero in on that area and work to monitor activity in the neighboring soil. Placing monitoring stations in these high traffic areas allows for the detection of the places where placement of the termite bait would be the most effective and lethal to the colony. Getting a sense of the worker termite traffic flow is very important in this phase of the extermination process so that the work can be done as quickly and efficiently as possible with as little structural damage as the exterminator can manage. Spot spraying is, of course, used when in contact with large groups of the insects, but residuals and termite bait are much more effective at getting to the nest and eradicating the colony as a whole. Baiting when done effectively creates a long term solution and takes care of the problem rather than merely addressing its symptoms.

How Termite Bait Works

Any effective bait will contain one of a number of available slow acting insecticides. The reason they have to be slow acting is so that they give the workers enough time to get back to the colony to feed the others and spread the insecticide to them before they die. These termiticides work by poisoning the colony to kill or sterilize multiple generations over a relatively short period of time. Usually the effects of the bait hit the termite colony within a few weeks to a few months.

Limits of Termite Bait

There is somewhat of a downside to the use of bait for the eradication of termites. When done correctly and introduced successfully to the colony, this form of termiticide is extremely effective at eradicating the colony and ensuring that it will ultimately die out. However, as mentioned previously, it is a slow process. For this reason, most exterminators will also use fast acting sprays that instantly kill these pests in the areas where their activity is most evident. A combination of these sprays along with the effective but slow moving termite bait is the method of choice for many professionals.