In Brief

This is a general guide to termites.  It is aimed at pest issues and students of the beasts.  

Why?

This site began about 14 years back as just another dawn-of-the-web homepage telling you facts about me and the things I do (I work with the critters) but it soon morphed into a set of  resources to reduce the  time I spent answering questions.

What's here

You'll find a jumble of information built from all my email answers to people around the world. You can learn lots about termites, what they are and what they do, about avoiding termite problems, how to get rid of termites if you have them and how not to get rid of termites.

Now

If you have any concerns, right now is as good a time as any to have your home professionally inspected. People who are super-confident, infallible & rich enough to bet-the-whole-house, can do their own inspections.

In my part of Southern Australia (yes, I probably live on a different continent to you) it's Autumn (Fall) and we've had a summer with the hottest, driest days on record with lots of my local forest burned.  Oddly, such burns don't greatly upset termites. Those of you in the North are out of the cold. so your termites are well into their Spring flight season. 

Where's Wally Don?

The changing seasons sees me busy doing various tasks for various people and, of course, still renovating my home. At the moment, the wily termites are taking me to New Zealand where pest termites are not native, so emailed queries may well take three of four days for an answer.

As usual, I'm trying to make these pages a lot better, but answering email questions, work and my DIY home renovations get in the way. And yes, there are termites in my yard. Three species. Two subterraneans and a dampwood (although the drought has been very hard on the dampwoods). As long as they are not in the house, I have no problem with them. Haven't found any drywoods yet. Anyway, now the pages have a whole new look and I'm slowly building a FAQ from new answers.  Should keep it up to date.  Meanwhile, here is a link to the old, original Bait Box Page

 History

When I started this site, Alta Vista (the original search tool) only indexed 35 pages that included the word "termite" in the whole of the known web. Now Google knows well over five million of them and countless thousands of them are barely disguised business sites claiming to offer good advice. Be wary out there.

When it all began, back at CSIRO, each month only about a thousand people would drop by.  Now the site averages well over 3,000 crude hits per day.  Keeping with the outdated fashions,webcounter; says that you are visitor number to this page (not the whole site!).

I wish that a million and a half people would also read my research papers!
Please feel free to drop me a note.