Posted on 26th Oct 2011 @ 4:03 PM

Last week from suburban Perth, we had two reports of termites swarming. It doesn't usually happen until early November so termites are a month or so early!

The termites erupted from a top window frame and the top architrave of a door in the living rooms of these home, filling the rooms with thousands of fluttering teenage termites looking to match up, shack up and begin new colonies.

Ion Staunton, author of termite text books, said the natural thing to do is panic in this confrontation but in fact the termites choosing to begin their colonising flight inside a house were doomed to dry out and die even without the aerosol fly sprays used by the homeowners. Because termites are weak flyers their survival instincts are to emerge from the highest part of their network of galleries so they can flutter further away from the launch before they touch down on the ground. The termites that chose the inside of the house instead of say, the outside gables, pergola posts, etc would never be able to find what is absolutely necessary for successful colony: wood in contact with the permanent moisture found in soil.

Even flights from trees and poles outside had a failure rate of close to 99% but the reason over a billion dollars worth of termite damage occurs in Australia each year is because some succeed.

Flying termites are the only insects with all four wings of the same size and they drop them soon after landing because they cannot get airborne again and the wings are of no use to them burrowing in the soil.

The homeowners in these two incidents were able to add a non-toxic-to-humans termite bait to their window and door frames which the termite workers take back to kill off the queen and the whole colony.

Read more about swarming termites here