7 Signs of Termites in Your Fresno Home

Termites hide, but the evidence doesn’t

Termites can eat at a Fresno house for years without being seen. What they can’t hide is the evidence. Most of it turns up in an afternoon walk-around with a flashlight and a screwdriver. The seven signs of termites below are the ones worth knowing. They’re listed roughly in the order Fresno homeowners report them. Wings on a windowsill after the first fall rain. Pellets on the garage floor. Mud tubes spotted during some other project under the house.

Keep two things in mind as you read. First, each sign points toward one of two species, drywood or subterranean. The two get completely different treatments, so the evidence is worth reading before you react to it. Second, no single sign tells you how big the problem is. A sign only tells you something is there. Finding out how far it goes takes a trained eye and a full look at the house.

Each sign, and what it means

Mud tubes are the strongest sign on the list. Subterranean termites live in the soil and dry out fast in open air. So they build covered tunnels of dirt and saliva from the ground up to the wood. Each tube is about the width of a pencil. Check the foundation stem walls, the crawl-space piers, and the spot where the garage slab meets the wall. Check where concrete steps or planters touch the house, too. Most tubes run straight up. Some hang down from subfloors like dirt straws. Others hide in the gap between a porch and the siding. A tube means subterranean termites found the house. It doesn’t always mean they’re still active. Inspectors often break a small section open and look for live workers. If the break gets patched within a week, the tube is in use.

Frass is the drywood calling card, and people vacuum it up for months before they recognize it. Frass is the dry, sawdust-looking pellets that drywood termites push out of the wood. These termites live entirely inside the boards they eat. They shove their droppings out through pinholes called kick-out holes. The pellets pile up below in neat little mounds. They look like coarse ground pepper or tiny seeds. Garages, window sills, and attic framing are the usual spots. Here’s the test against sawdust. Pellets are hard and uniform, and they roll like sand between your fingers. Real sawdust is stringy and clumps. Sawdust points to beetles or carpenter ants. Pellets mean drywood termites. A fresh pile means the tunnel above it is live.

Swarmers indoors mean a mature colony is reproducing. Swarmers are the winged termites a colony sends out to start new colonies. If they come out inside your house, the colony is almost always in the structure itself. Discarded wings are the same event, found later. Swarmers drop all four wings within hours of landing. The wings pile up on sills, in bathtubs, and in spiderwebs. Compare the wings to each other. Termite wings are all one size. Ant wings come in two sizes.

The last three signs live in the wood itself. Hollow-sounding wood taps papery because termites eat the inside and leave a thin painted shell. Run a screwdriver handle along fascia or baseboard and listen for the sound to change. Blistered paint or rippled drywall traces the feeding tunnels, called galleries, running just under the surface. People often repaint right over an active infestation. Soft door frames, sills, and floors are the late stage. By then most of the wood inside is gone. A screwdriver tip settles it fast. Solid wood pushes back. Eaten wood gives way.