The termites are coming! The termites are coming!
But you probably already knew that. Even if you have not personally experienced the spring swarms that will occur any time now across the Washington area, typically when a sunny day follows a rain, you might have noticed the swarm of TV ads prophesying impending doom.
A barrage of advertising by local and national pest control firms is not unusual this time of year, warning homeowners about the voracious bugs that cause more than $2.5 billion in damage annually. The message this season may seem particularly intense, predicting that last year's near-record rains have primed the pumps for more.
But the companies that make termite treatment products also have started pouring millions of dollars into aggressive advertising campaigns, hoping nervous homeowners will ask pest control operators for their particular remedies by name.
Since January, BASF Professional Pest Control, maker of the Termidor Termite Control liquid treatment, has launched a national ad campaign and a public relations blitz that features a traveling two-story inflatable termite. The giant bug, 69,000 times the size of the actual insect, is being dispatched to zoos, museums and other public arenas in 21 cities, starting in the South, where termites swarm the earliest. Visitors can walk through the 20-by-60-foot insect to try interactive exhibits and games offering facts on termite biology and extermination. (The Towering Termite Tour will be in Richmond on April 30, May 1 and 2, and in Baltimore on May 7, 8 and 9. The schedule is at the Web site www.toweringtermitetour.com.)
Dow AgroSciences, maker of Sentricon Colony Elimination System, the leading termite baiting system , was the first to direct ads at the general public almost 10 years ago. The company claims that over the years its "authorized operators" have treated the White House, Mount Vernon, the Alamo, the Statue of Liberty and Independence Hall.
Bayer Environmental Science, which heavily markets the Premise Termite Elimination liquid treatment in states hard-hit by termites, last month announced a new nationwide campaign with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to educate consumers and save historic sites endangered by termites.
The direct marketing of termite control products to homeowners is not just new, "it's revolutionary," says Greg Baumann, technical director of the National Pest Management Association, a nonprofit organization of more than 5,000 companies that is based in Dunn Loring. "They're producing consumer information sheets so that consumers will be in a better position to understand their products and to ask for them."
Fighting Termites 3 Ways
The outreach is seen by Baumann as the latest turn of events in an industry that went into shock in 1987 when the Environmental Protection Agency banned chlordane and heptachlor, the main pesticides used for 40 years to control termites. The major chemical companies gulped and regrouped behind other products after the ban, and regrouped again in 2001 after another widely used pesticide, Dow's Dursban, was withdrawn from household use because of environmental and health concerns.
When the dust -- or the cloud of swarming termites -- settled, there emerged three basic methods for combating termites: repellent liquids, non-repellent liquids, and baits. The five largest manufacturers in the multibillion-dollar business are Dow, BASF, Bayer, FMC Corp., Syngenta and Whitmire Micro-Gen. And it seems that competition for customers has become as fierce as the bug itself.
Liquid repellents, which have been around for years, are now formulated as the more environment-friendly successors to chlordane and heptachlor. These products, injected into the soil, repel and kill termites by setting up a liquid chemical barrier around the perimeter of a building. One of the major repellent manufacturers is Philadelphia-based FMC Corp., maker of Dragnet, Prevail and Talstar.
FMC has been on the market about 20 years, company spokesman Neil DeStefano says. "Our generation of chemistry . . . replaced those other repellent technologies," he says, adding that all liquid repellents today meet EPA requirements. "They have to go through significant testing both from an efficacy standpoint and from a human toxicology and environmental standpoint."
But repellents have lost ground to the newer non-repellents, industry analysts say. These treatments also must be injected into the soil or laid down in trenches, but instead of repelling, they invite termites to come into contact with the poison and carry the toxin back to the colony.
Premise, one of the top non-repellents, "eliminates pests three ways: through ingestion, contact and the 'Domino Effect,' " says Byron Reid, a Bayer entomologist. The product is deadly to termites if eaten, touched directly or touched indirectly from another termite that has crossed the product's odorless "treated zone."
