Innovative borate treatment protects Florida historical village from drywood termites and powderpost beetles.
Buildings can shake when lightning bolts strike and storm winds blow in the Tampa, Fla., area. When a building shakes, drywood termite pellets sometimes spill out of kick holes. Pellets can be from an active colony, or they could be leftovers from a dead colony.
As the museum director for the Pinellas County Heritage Village in Largo, Fla., Ken Ford could not afford to be wrong about the source of the drywood pellets he was finding in 1992. Ford’s job is to preserve more than 20 buildings on the 21-acre, open-air historical village and museum. Fumigation was usually the answer to a drywood termite infestation. However, after several buildings had been fumigated two or three times in a five-year period, Ford was looking for another option.
"Heritage Village is situated in a site with dense pine and palmetto,” Ford says. “It is close to the Gulf and the area is loaded with drywood termites. I wanted to find something that would give long-term protection. When local newspapers ran stories back in 1992 about a new borate treatment for drywoods, I called.”
The newspaper articles Ford read featured work done by HomeGuard Pest Control in Largo. HomeGuard had successfully used structural borate treatments to protect several notable commercial properties from drywood termites in the Tampa area in the previous year. HomeGuard was also serving residential customers with its HomeGuard Borate Treatment Program.
HomeGuard’s inspection of the Heritage Village buildings in April 1992 confirmed Ford’s concern that several buildings were under attack by drywood termites. Ford was most concerned about the McMullen-Coachman log house, a cabin built in 1852 and the oldest surviving building in Pinellas County. The cabin had been fumigated twice in recent years, but was infested with drywood termites, powderpost beetles, subterranean termites and wood fungus.
Glenn Gordon, president of HomeGuard, considered the Lowe House a bigger treatment challenge. The century-old, two-story home had recently been moved to Heritage Village and had been fumigated just prior to relocating to the museum. Despite the recent fumigation, the building had drywood infestations in numerous locations.
“The Lowe House is of board-and-batten construction so there are no wall voids to treat with a borate,” Gordon says. “Both the exterior and interior walls had also been painted, so the wood was sealed, making the treatment more challenging.”
HomeGuard began treating the museum’s structures in April 1992. The treatment meant injecting all active drywood termite galleries with Tim-bor® Professional Wood Preservative/Insect Control. At the same time, all accessible wood in each building, including wall voids, crawlspaces and attics, were treated with a 15% solution of Tim-bor Professional. Once applied, the highly water-soluble active ingredient — disodium octaborate tetrahydrate — protects against drywood and subterranean termites, wood-destroying beetles, carpenter ants and carpenter bees. Tim-bor Professional also kills wood-destroying fungi on contact.
HomeGuard completed its treatments of the buildings in October 1992. Major structures treated include the Victorian “Seven Gables” House, the Safety Harbor First Methodist Church, the Harris School, the Sulphur Springs Train Depot, the Heritage Mercantile Store, a fisherman’s cottage, a pavilion, a water tower and a sugar cane mill. All buildings added to the museum’s collection since 1992 have also been protected with a structural borate treatment.
Soil termiticide treatments and termite shields, installed when the buildings were moved to the their museum site, protect the buildings from subterranean termite attack and make visual inspections easier.
Annual inspections by HomeGuard personnel have found the buildings free of drywood termites for seven years. Although drywood termites were found in three large wooden planters that were brought onto the grounds in the past year, the most recent inspection found Heritage Village buildings clear of drywood termites. HomeGuard technicians eliminated the colonies with a localized treatment using Tim-bor® Professional.
Ford says the flexibility of borates has been useful to protect museum artifacts. When drywood termites were found in an old organ several years ago, HomeGuard technicians treated the organ using small needles to inject the galleries.
“I watched the treatment,” Ford says. “The termite galleries were injected until the borate began to come out the kick holes. The treatment eliminated the problem and did not damage the organ. There was not even any discoloration of the wood from the treatment.”
Most impressive, Ford adds, is the fact that the museum’s buildings show no signs of active drywood termites.
“We get more than 150,000 visitors at the museum every year,” he says. “So, my maintenance crew of five and I do thorough safety checks every month to make sure that stairs and railings are secure. We all look for termites on these inspections but haven’t found any in years. HomeGuard Pest Control inspects the museum buildings every year and they have not found any active drywood termites.”
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PIONEERING TREATMENTS. Providing a thorough treatment of a property is the key to long-term protection with borates, Gordon says. HomeGuard began using borates in the mid-1970s for general pest control by mixing boric acid, pyrethrum and silica gels as an insecticide dust, and mixing peanut butter and boric acid as a cockroach bait.
In 1987, Gordon read an article about the effective use of borates to protect homes in Europe, Australia and New Zealand from termites and other wood-destroying pests. The challenge was to find a way to apply the borates to wood in existing homes. Gordon began working on application equipment in 1987. He designed a working unit in 1989 and began using it commercially that same year.
Gordon says the company learned through trial and error how to locate and treat all construction voids and how to treat wood members through insulation. Attics, crawlspaces, the back of baseboards, even carpeting tack strips are all thoroughly treated.
“We experimented with borates with termites in a large fish tank, then used mock-up construction,” Gordon says. “Next, we treated all of our employees’ homes. We did a lot of small residential jobs and made ourselves nuisances because we would come back to see if it was working and to refine our application techniques. We would even pull wood out to see what was going on.”
The results were impressive. “Tim-bor is an odorless, clear liquid that controls termites, wood-destroying beetles and fungi,” he says. “When we saw the results, we began offering it as a service in 1989. We stopped recommending tent fumigations for drywood termites in December 1989.”
Gordon says the HomeGuard Borate Treatment Program is priced about 20% above fumigation, but it comes with a lifetime warranty with an annual renewal fee. Because the product does not break down or degrade as long as the wood is not subject to ground contact or running water, Gordon tells his customers that a structural borate treatment adds tangible value to their home.
Customers also appreciate the convenience involved in a borate treatment. There is no need to move out of the home for several days as is the case with a tent fumigation.
“Elderly people especially like it because they do not like to have to move out or put their pets in a kennel,” Gordon says. “We’ve also treated nursing homes where medical professionals were concerned about the risk of having to move people in critical care out of the facility for several weeks for a tent fumigation.”
With growing expertise in termite control, Gordon says his company is now doing residential termite control in a seven-county area of Florida, and is doing commercial termite control throughout Florida. Gordon has consulted on termite control work outside the state, sometimes with museum directors and curators who have heard about his successful work from Ken Ford at Heritage Village.
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