As soon as you hear the words ‘Termite Infestation‘ when buying a house, a sense of foreboding overtakes you. How bad is it?  Has the structure already been compromised? I had these feelings, wondering whether such a great find would be spoilt by the smallest of creatures.
It’s certainly not a thing to be brushed aside or taken lightly. In France there are five species of termite that do serious damage to properties if not treated in time. I have one of these, Reticulitermes banyulensis, which unlike woodworm that live in the wood all year round, these only feed there and then return to their underground nest to nourish their offspring.
My colony is alive – on my first visit to the house I pulled off a piece of door surround and found thousands of termites moving around underneath.

This image is the lintel above the door to the old kitchen which is now basically hollow.

If an old house is left too long, the termites will eat literally everything that is wood. Because they hate the daylight, they cleverly remain just under the surface, never piercing through except during breeding season when they eat through the last millimetre and fly off to create new nests. The galleries are quite incredible, just leaving paper-thin walls inside the beams that they can pass through to access new feeding areas.
Many homeowners find out when its too late to treat, as the following picture show. The standard building practice up to 60 years ago was to plaster over the expose wooden beams, leaving a neat finish and hiding the beam itself. This was fine aesthetically – the problems these days arise when the beams are attacked and its not possible to see the damage the termites are doing until there’s a catastrophic structural failure. My beams have suffered massive infestation over several years and have actually failed at the beam wall socket causing the whole ceiling to drop several centimetres, which can be seen here.

Without these acro-props in place all the ceilings on this side of the house would collapse, and that could potentially cause untold damage elsewhere.