Termites!

Found a bit of termite damage today. Not much and it's not active which is the main thing.

I've done a fair bit of reading about termites and I cannot find much that is anything other than "apocolyptic". I'm not saying termites don't do bad damage - they do - but in my experience people love to mix the damage done by termites vs carpenter ants, and pest control people seem to egg on the fact that termites are the end of the world. Carpenter ant or termite - all the same thing to a pest control guy.

First of all, both insects do similar damage, they both make galleries in the wood and weaken it.

However, carpenter ants eat rotten wood, termites eat dry wood. If you have carpenter ants then you have rotting wood and a water leak somewhere. If you have termites then you just have termites and termites will ONLY eat dry wood.

But the interesting thing that I never find written down is that termites seem to like one thing and then move off. I've seen this in numerous properties where the termites eat one single bit of wood and then bugger off. At one of our houses they ate 2 studs out of about 30. At another house I've seen them eat 2 planks of a hardwood floor, and nothing else. At another house I've seen them eat two plywood 8x4s and that was it.

The 'one thing' they may eat could be a house. But I haven't seen that yet.

In this house that I'm working on they've eaten part of a stud, and not even much of it. I can't see anymore damage either. And it's literally one bit of one stud.