Can I clean up the mud tubes after my house has been treated?
Jan e-mailed in this question:
"I recently had my home chemically treated for termites. I have mud
tubes on the wood beams in the basement ceiling. Should the mud tubes be
cleaned off now since it has been treated?"
There isn't really any reason not to if you used a liquid treatment. If you
used a bait system (where they put little stakes in the ground outside your
house) I would leave them alone for awhile because you want the them to spread
the bait around the colony. If you used another kind of treatment, most are
designed to create chemical barriers that kill termites if they try to cross
them, so there's no reason to leave them there.
The mud tunnels are just connections between the underground colony and your house, the food source. If the colony is active, they'll be built back up again. If not, once you clean them off they'll be gone for good.
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