Ion, the next one’s from Dale, and Dale writes thus: “I laid a bait on top of pavers adjacent to where termites were found in an unused wine barrel. Yet when discovered, they quickly retreated below the pavers. Upon calling your office, I was advised to bait the barrel and the surrounding pavers. This was some weeks ago.

Can you please advise when it becomes okay to disturb the baits, to see if termites are gone and presumably dead, and thus stations on the back pavers can be removed? I’ve got plenty of stations at the house-level in the vicinity of this incident, and haven’t seen any evidence under the house through inspection. And also, do you anticipate much of the actual bait used will be gone?” ‘

Ion: Okay, I remember talking to Dale. He had the wine barrel, and he did move it, and found the termites in the staves of the wine barrel. It was actually ready for a plant potting, you know, the barrel was cut in half, ready to pot a plant. And because he had disturbed them, and he put it back and he called me. I said, “If you can find live termites in the wine barrel, eating again, then you bait them, and you can put some traps around and near the barrel, so that maybe, if they’re being disturbed form the barrel, they’ll come up the gap between the pavers in the same sort of area, and make it into the traps. I haven’t heard from him since until now, so it would seem that he may have found live termites in the barrel. And maybe I’m really wrong – maybe he hasn’t seen any since he’s put the bait around.

But the answer is, really – if there are no lives termites eating, he may as well remove the barrel and do whatever he needs to do with these pavers, and then after he’s done all that – put the traps back on the new pavers, or wherever he wants to put them around the house. Because if there’s no live termites now, there’s no point in leaving the bait there, because they’ve either gone, which means that the colony is still alive, so the scouts coming from that colony – the good chance is they’ll find the traps placed over the new pavers or wherever he’s going to put the traps. That way, then you start again with the baiting process, and the baiting process is much more reliably inclined to succeed, by feeding them into the traps, rather than into a continuous hole on the edge of the wine barrel.