By Ion Staunton
If you carefully open termite-damaged timber, or push into their mud in a Termite Trap, you’ll probably see the mostly white workers. It’s the workers that matter most. Workers know where their nest is. They chew off wood, take it back and regurgitate it to feed the young, which are too immature to venture away from the nest. The royals need feeding too. The soldiers, with darker heads and jaws, defend the colony.
Why workers choose the bait
Colony Killer Termite Bait is alpha cellulose (a soft, purified wood fibre) containing chlorfluazuron, an inhibitor that stops insects making chitin, the material in their outer shell (cuticle). The worker quickly decides this soft bait is far easier to harvest than solid wood. It’s essentially pre-chewed wood. To us it would seem like mashed potato!
If hungry soldiers are nearby, the worker will likely regurgitate some of the new food so the soldiers can suck it in, bypassing their big defensive jaws. The worker then takes another bellyful of bait and heads back to the nest.
What happens inside the nest
The nest is teeming with nymphs, frequently moulting. Each time, they shed their straitjacket of a cuticle and take in air to expand to the next, larger size. Once the new cuticle hardens, in an hour or so, the nymph wants more food to grow to the next size, on the way to becoming a worker, a soldier, or maybe a winged reproductive that swarms off to start a new nest.
This is where the bait becomes really lethal. The chitin inhibitor doesn’t break down.
It’s a tiny proportion of the bait you placed, but when it’s fed to young nymphs, it stops them making a new layer of protective chitin in time for their next moult. No new shell material? They die.
As the workers eat the bodies, that “food” is regurgitated and fed to other young nymphs. They die too. It keeps killing the young as they try to grow up.
Why don’t the workers die?
They already have their protective shell and aren’t making more, so they’re unaffected. That’s what keeps them carrying bait back to the nest.
The queen and the eggs
The royals are right next to the nursery and desperately need feeding, the queen most of all. She produces a constant stream of eggs, all day, every day. Eggs have shells too, a form of chitin, so the eggs don’t hatch. In about 90 days (three months) the colony is usually dead.
Multi-nest colonies: just keep baiting
Some colonies have more than one nest, joined by a few common tunnels. When one nest dies, the next one may “invade”. Hopefully they find the bait you placed, but it takes roughly another three months to kill that nest too. The main multi-nest termite in Australia is Schedorhinotermes, which has two different-sized soldiers.
Just keep baiting. They’ll eventually stop, because they’re all dead. And you did it!
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