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Is This A Termite Infestation, or Something Else ?
Just noticed something disturbing in our spare room this morning. The room is used as a storage room, so we don't go in there much, and as the storage room is pretty full we couldn't see the window frame/sill easily until some stored items were moved out. My guess is that this infestation has appeared in the last six to twelve months.
Little piles of "dirt", for want of a better description, have formed on the window sill, around four old wood screw holes. The four wood screw holes were used to secure inside fly screens, before we had the old casement windowss replaced with sliding glass windows. Double Click on the photos to get a much larger and more detailed view. To give you some sense of scale, those old wood screw holes in the photographs used to have #6 wood screws in them, so the holes are about 3 mm diameter.
In the top photo, I've wiped away most of the saw dust to try and see what sort of insect is living down that hole. So far, I've not seen any insect in or around the hole. There is a trail of tiny 1mm long ants on an adjacent wall nearby. These sort of ants been very prevalent around the house this Summer just gone.
I don't know whether these little ants are doing the damage inside this window sill, or whether I've got a termite infestation.
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I've gone over the window sill with a small hammer, lightly tapping the sill trying to hear if there are any hollow sounding areas, but everything sounds solid. The house is around 60 years old, hardwood timber framed, hardwood chamfer boards outside, and plaster board inside. If this window is constructed similarly to another one that I recently worked on in the house, then the window frame, and the surrounding moulding, are a soft wood, possibly hoop pine.
So - can anyone who knows their stuff with regard to termites etc, advise whether this looks like a termite infestation, or am I looking at some other sort of insect infestation ?
Thanks,
RoyG
