Termites are Swarming In Chattanooga, What To Do?

Welcome again to the Volunteer Rid A Pest podcast. My name is Mike Stewart. I’m the host and we have got pest expert, Erik Gardner on the line right here to answer your pest questions for Chattanooga and the Chattanooga surrounding areas. Erik, you here?

I’m here.

Well, right now it is April 2020 and there’s a lot going on this year in 2020. People might hear this podcast a year from now, but you’ll remember April was the year of the coronavirus, but it also is spring. And you know what? The termites are swarming in Chattanooga. They don’t care about any pandemics. What they care about is doing what they’ve done for centuries and centuries. And I know you got some stories about Chattanooga termite swarming that you want to share with us.

Absolutely. The termites don’t care if there’s a virus out here, they’re coming out anyway. We’re getting calls every day about termite swarms. And I had an interesting one yesterday. A lady called me, said she had had some bugs fly out in her kitchen. She thought they were ants, but she wanted me to come look at them. So went out there and looked at them and she told me that every year for the last three or four years, they fly out in the corner of her kitchen. She sprays them with a little bug spray she had on hand and they died. She sweeps them up and that’s the end of it. Doesn’t seem any more. But this is the fourth year and she thought she better call somebody.

Well, sure enough, they were termites. Identified them and I didn’t tell her right away. I said, “Well, let me go under the floor and take a look.” I got under her kitchen and it was just about destroyed because she hadn’t taken action. She thought, I sprayed him with bug spray, they’re gone. But they weren’t gone. The swarmers were gone, but the worker termites were still under there, destroying her floor.

So the story is here, don’t just assume everything’s okay. Get a professional to come out and take a look. Call somebody you trust. If you don’t have a company that you use, give us a call. We’d be glad to come out. We won’t charge anything for the inspection. We’ll take a look at it, give you an honest evaluation. But the worst thing you can do is bury your head in the sand and hope is not termites.

Well, one of the things you taught me about termites is the swarmers are just one of the divisions of the colony. I mean, there is so much going on underground in your home, in the wood, through the tunnels that they make from the ground to your wood. So just assuming that you’re getting rid of swarmers by killing them with a home remedy or much worse some sort of consumer spray, that’s just not enough.

When you have a serious problem, you need an expert to take care of it. And that’s what I know you do at Volunteer Rid A Pest and Chattanooga Pest Control, chattanoogatermiteandpestcontrol.com. Any things else you want to talk about swarming and Chattanooga that will be helpful to the audience?

Yeah, I think everyone just needs to keep in mind that when they bought their home, all of the responsibility for protecting it fell upon them. And I hear this all the time. I’ll go to somebody’s house and say, “Well, what type of termite protection do you have?” And they look at me and say, “Well, the builder treated it when the home was built.” “Well, when was that?” “Well, 1992.” Or I hear this all the time, “Well, the guy who owned it before had it treated.” “Really? Who did he have treat it? What material did they use?” “Well, I don’t know.”

So it’s just a lot of hope. I hope somebody took care of it because I haven’t. And that’s a pretty dangerous game to play. I would recommend if you own a home, get somebody to inspect it right away and make sure that it’s okay, because it is a very expensive mistake to let it go and not know until you start noticing soft spots in the floor or you