Benefit Pest Management provides termite control across Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and the Hunter. We inspect and work out which species is active and where it is getting in. Then we set up a chemical barrier or a baiting system to deal with the colony, not just the termites you can see. Our head technician holds pest management technician licence 5083379, issued by the New South Wales EPA. The Australian Standard sets inspection intervals at no more than twelve months.
We get back to every enquiry within one business day.
A tree at the back of the block with the bark stripped back, and the termites right through the trunk.
Accredited
Termite control is two jobs, and they get run together constantly. The first is finding out whether you have termites and where they are. The second is doing something about the colony.
Most people ring about the second and need the first. You cannot treat what you have not found, and termites are very good at not being found. They work inside the timber, behind the render and under the floor. The painted surface stays intact until there is almost nothing left underneath it.
So this page covers the whole picture: how termites behave in this region, why they choose one house over another, and the options open to you once we know the situation. The detail on each treatment sits on its own page, linked as we go.
01
Find it
Whether you have termites, and where they are. This is the job most people skip and the one everything else depends on.
THEN
02
Deal with the colony
Not the termites you can see. The nest that keeps sending them.
Three species matter around here, and knowing which one you have changes what happens next.
Species 01
Australia’s most destructive termite, it nests underground or inside the base of a living tree, and a single colony can run past a million termites. Where a house in this region has structural termite damage, this is usually what caused it.
Species 02
The next one we find. Its soldiers come in two distinct sizes, which is one of the ways we separate it from the others on site. It does genuine structural damage, and it turns up most often in damp timber close to the ground.
Species 03
Its soldiers have a pointed snout rather than jaws. You will find it in fence posts, sleepers and old stumps more often than in a house frame, but a nest in the yard is still a nest with a house next to it.
Working out which one you have is not a technicality. A baiting system that suits one species is the wrong call for another, and the species tells us where to go looking for the nest.
A termite colony is not a swarm of insects that happens to be in your wall. It behaves more like one organism spread out over a lot of ground.
The queen and king sit in the nest producing more termites. The workers, which are the ones actually eating your house, travel out along mud tubes, take the timber back, and feed the rest of the colony, including the soldiers that guard the tubes. Nobody in that arrangement survives alone.
Which brings us to the mistake almost everyone makes. The termites you find when you break open a skirting board are a tiny fraction of the colony and they are entirely replaceable. Spray them and the colony seals off that route, reroutes, and carries on somewhere else in the building where nobody is looking. The problem has not gone away. It has moved, and it is now harder to find.
Anything that genuinely works has to reach the nest.
Not to scale. The nest is usually further from the house than this, and the tube can be metres long.
The queen and king, producing more termites. This is what any treatment has to reach.
Workers travel out along it, take the timber back, and feed the colony. Soldiers guard it.
A tiny fraction of the colony, and entirely replaceable. Spray it and the route gets sealed and moved.
Almost nobody knows this until it matters. Standard home and contents policies in Australia exclude damage caused by termites, and it sits in the exclusions alongside wear and tear and gradual deterioration, because insurers treat it as maintenance rather than a sudden event.
What that means in practice is simple enough: if termites get into your frame, the repair bill is yours, and it is rarely a small one. Finding it early costs a fraction of finding it late. That single fact is the entire argument for an inspection, and it is why the standard sets an interval at all.
Read your own policy. The exclusions, not the summary page.
Section 7
An illustration of the shape these pages take, not a real policy. Yours will use its own words. Find them.
We call these conducive areas, or attractive conditions: the things around a building that make it easy to get into and comfortable to stay in. Most of them come down to moisture, and most of them are fixable without a tradesperson.
A leaking gutter or downpipe putting water against the wall
Mulch over the slab edge
Damp, dark, and sitting exactly where we would want to see the ground.
Render over the slab edge
A mud tube coming straight up out of the ground behind the render line.
From a retirement village
That last one deserves its own paragraph. The slab edge is exactly where we look for mud tubes coming up out of the ground, and render over it hides them completely. We have worked on a retirement village where the render went over the slab edge years before anyone noticed. The termites walked straight up behind it, reached the roof, and started working back down through the building. From outside there was nothing to see, because there was nothing visible to find.
Sorting out conducive areas does not replace treatment. It makes treatment last, and it is most of what ends up in our written recommendations. Where a subfloor is damp and mouldy, subfloor ventilation dries it out and makes the house less attractive in the first place.
The more carbon dioxide a building gives off, through mould, moisture and vegetation against the walls, the more likely termites are to find it.
AS 3660.2
12
Months
The most a termite inspection interval should ever be
AS 3660.2 is the Australian Standard covering termite management in existing buildings. It puts the inspection interval at not more than twelve months, and shorter where the risk is higher: an older home, a known history of activity, a bush block, or a subfloor nobody can get into properly.
Twelve months is not a number we made up to sell inspections. The standard uses that number because a colony can do meaningful structural damage inside a year.
So the useful question is not whether you need an inspection. It is when the last one was. If you cannot remember, it is overdue.
Once we know what is active and where it is coming from, four things get used, usually in combination rather than alone.
01
A treated zone in the soil around the building, so termites cannot get from the ground into the house without passing through it. Full detail on termite treatment.
02
Stations in the ground that the colony finds, feeds on and carries home. This is the option that eliminates a colony rather than blocking it, and it is the one we lean on hardest. See termite baiting systems.
03
Dealing with what is living in the building right now, before any longer-term protection goes in.
04
Drainage, ventilation, timber contact. Cheapest of the four, and the one most often skipped.
We can, and we choose not to push it, because the margin in that job comes from marking up materials rather than from the work itself. Post-construction is where we are useful.
Which combination suits your house depends on how it is built, what is active, and what we can physically reach. That is a conversation after the inspection, not before it.
You do not need to identify a species. You need to know what is worth a phone call.
Mud tubes
On brickwork, piers or up the outside of a wall, about pencil width and the colour of dried mud
Hollow timber
Timber that sounds hollow when tapped, or gives under a thumbnail where it should not
Blistered paint or plaster
Rippled in a patch, often around a skirting or an architrave
A sticking door or window
One that has started sticking with no other explanation
Flying insects, then wings
Around lights in warm humid weather, then discarded wings on a windowsill
Damaged timber is the giveaway. Termite-eaten timber has almost nothing left inside it even where the surface still looks sound.
Two things worth knowing before you go looking. Leave anything you do find alone: breaking workings open makes the colony move, and moving termites are harder to find and harder to treat. Not every hole in timber is a termite either: borer beetles leave a different pattern entirely, covered on borers and timber beetles.
If someone has told you that you have white ants, that is the same insect under an older name. There is a full explanation on white ants.
Where we do this work
Every suburb we cover is on the service areas page.
Maitland photo by Bidgee and Singleton photo by Bandworthy, CC BY-SA 3.0. Upper Hunter photo by Mattinbgn, CC BY 3.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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★★★★★We have used Benefit Pest Management for the past 12 months with a range of services. Pest sprays, pest management and termite prevention. The owner Nathan is always so accommodating and flexible with booking times working in with our schedule. Quality services every time and excellent customer service. With our termite prevention, Nathan routinely checks the system and keeps us up to date with the latest baiting which is such peace of mind.
★★★★★His very good at communicating and explaining what he needs to do and answering questions.
Tell the next person how it went. A review helps them decide, and it helps us more than you would think.
Straight answers
Yes. Most termite damage is found by inspection rather than by the owner noticing something, because the damage happens inside timber where nothing shows on the surface. The Australian Standard sets the interval at twelve months for exactly that reason.
The inspection is the diagnosis and the control work is the treatment. An inspection tells you whether there is activity, which species, where it is getting in and what is feeding it. Nothing sensible can be specified until that is done.
No. A newer house is just as reachable if the conditions suit, and sometimes more so. A fresh slab with garden beds built up against it and new landscaping timber gives a colony everything it needs. Age matters far less than moisture, timber contact and whether anybody is checking.
Not in any way that reaches the colony. Retail products kill the termites you can see and leave the nest untouched, and the usual result is that the colony reroutes and keeps eating in a part of the house you are no longer watching.
No, they slow down. Subterranean species live below ground where the temperature is far steadier than the air above it, so activity continues through the cooler months. Swarming is seasonal; feeding is not.
Fast enough that the twelve-month interval exists. A mature colony working on a soft, damp timber can cause structural damage within a year, which is why the standard is written around annual inspections rather than a longer cycle.
Send it through and we'll ring you back.
Name, phone and suburb are all we need. The rest helps, and a photo helps most.
The next step
Seen something you cannot explain? Or has it been more than a year? Book an inspection before a small problem becomes a structural one. You get it in writing: the activity, the cause, and the work it needs.
Not sure if it's termites?
A quote costs nothing, and neither does the advice.
Termite control across Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and the Hunter. See every suburb we cover
Termite nests, preserved in our display cases.
