Entomologist and author Ion Staunton shares a brief history of termite control.
The pests don’t change. Termites have been evolving for millions of years; their appearance, their habits and basic food preferences essentially stay the same. Food and fabric pests? Same.
Termites have only been a problem in Australia for the last 237 years. New people arrived and began building things with wood. Termites from nearby colonies found and ate it. Australian humans took about a hundred years to come up with metal ‘ant’ caps to force termites out into the open to gain access to a building and humans took ‘only’ another 15-20 years to work out how to get them to take arsenic back to wherever their colony was to kill it. That event was just over a hundred years ago. About 60 years ago in the 1960s, we decided to build homes on concrete slabs, but termites still snuck into where the wood was hidden and the damage bill actually increased. Now we only use preservative-treated timber… or metal framework. However, there were millions of buildings built before then… and termites keep finding lots of them each year (and that’s why you are still important).
Phil Hadlington and I wrote our first pest control textbook in 1961. He passed away a couple of years ago and, as I’m turning 90 this year, I’m revising Urban Pest Management in Australia and also Australian Termites to bring them up to date. I’ve almost finished the job but it will take the publisher a while to get them onto the presses and into your hands (and glovebox).
Back to the first paragraph… “the pest don’t change… the situations do.”
Entomologists were few and far between in 1900. Pests were a pain; humans found and killed them with whatever was handy at the time. Natural pyrethrum was one of the first pesticides (after boiling water!). It was a powder ground up from the flowers of a chrysanthemum hundreds of years ago. It had widespread use in WW1 to kill lice (thriving inside soldiers’ uniforms) to prevent the spread of typhus.
Most of the first pesticides were administered as baits to poison the pest i.e. rodents, ants and cockroaches. Some of the actives were from minerals such as copper arsenate and borax mixed with whatever the pest preferred to eat; grain or fruit for rodents and anything sweet and syrupy for ants, for example. Petroleum oils applied to an insect killed it but if another ‘secret’ ingredient could increase the speed of kill, that would sell on the spot. Prospective purchasers wanted to see instant results and the salesmen (and maybe women) used demos to watching groups to show how fast it killed and therefore how good it was.
He may not have been the first to think outside the (instant killing) box, but as Bill Flick was one of us (a pestie) I’ll give him the credit. By the way, he told me this story at his 80th birthday party. Arsenic was being used as a bait to kill rats. It was a slow kill but they died. He was a dairy farmer, he also had beehives and termites kept eating his fences, milking sheds and house. One morning he watched a bee fly from a hive to a flowering shrub, scramble around inside the flowers then head back to the hive with its hind legs plastered and bulging with nectar. He wondered. Bees are communal insects. So are termites. If bees carried food back to their hive to feed their queen and young and to store as honey… aren’t worker termites doing almost the same thing? Taking chewed up wood back to their nests to feed their queen and nestmates?
Arsenic dust kills slowly, but only after it is digested. Workers groomed each other, regurgitated food and passed it on. He tried it. It worked. And the rest is history. Dig out a copy of Colonies in Collision; it’s a history book I wrote with Doug Howick.
Now we have an entomologist who went another step: digital. I came up with the idea to put sensors inside termite monitors just so you didn’t need to go multiple times a year to check them… only to find there are no termites… again… and again. De-motivating.
Perhaps more importantly, with these new sensors you are digitally notified when termites have actually arrived at a specific monitor and you get to begin baiting before they’ve eaten all the timber and left the monitor vacant. The sensor is designed to recognise termites from slugs, cockroaches and other ‘false-alarmists’. The pests don’t change, but the products and technology do!
What’s next? If I live another ten years, I might write another history article (maybe assisted by AI).
Ion Staunton, Entomologist and Author
