Thread: Lost my timber stash to termites

Hungry little buggars arent they? :eek: condolences and sympathies knucklehead

I was going to say perchance the black plastic sent out the same message to your hungry little mates as when I covered my tuart stack with the same stuff?? They came a runnin to the nice warm humid timber hell you could near hear the little mongrels salivitating!! :mad:

Originally Posted by Termite

Nasty. I must admit that the Queensland branch of the family have been a bit of an embarrasment for some time now, they have no respect for a persons private stash of timber. Definitely the black sheep of the family.

Whatever you say mate. You guys are bxxxxxx.

My local mexican ones are very finicky, dont normally touch pine, meranti or redgum. But a bit of messmate or manna gum is another matter. If I stick it on some treated pine fence posts, usually ok, but straight on the ground they make a beeline for it. Yet the blighters don't touch my firewood heap, figure that out.

After looking closely at the whole debacle I think the main food supply to the little buggers was the pine spacers between the planks. After going right through the timber i only found a couple that where still intact (out of 100 or so).
The hardwood did get eaten but mainly where there was an existing crack or check. Within the hardwood they seemed to like spotty gum the most.

I will never use pine spacers again.

Mal at Boutique Timbers at Rollands Plains has around 400 cu metres around under the grey gums.
White ants love pines of most varieties, blackbutt, a lot of eucalypts, blue gum etc. english oak, sapwood on most species, but dislike quite a few rainforest trees, it must be that these are older species than eucalypts and have had millions of years of time to develop chemicals that repel wite ants
For example, red cedar, rosewood, mackay cedar can be left around for years with no problems, apart for some borers in the sapwood. Old Campor laurel isn't touched although young trees will rot and may be gobbled.
Red Gum and jarrah will be chomped, as will many burls. Just move them around every month or so, so they can't develop a track from the ground up into the underside of the burl/pile.
Greg

nothing like living up to the name is there knucklehead?

Greg, West Australian white ants don't like jarrah much. They'll chomp on portions with wood rot and will skim the surface, but in general they'll walk all over a pile of jarrah to get to anything else - Marri, blackbutt, tuart, etc. And I've seen them pole vaulting to reach any Karri within reach.

Richard

Richard
Must admit, haven't a lot of experience with Jarrah, Mal has around 40 cube, but it's only ben in in stock for around 4-6 months.
I think the same holds for red gum, they chimp around the edges of the stickers, but don't really go the whole hog.
Blackbutt reminds me of marri, and they love it..... maybe they just like white 'meat', most pine is also light coloured? And can't stand the dark coloured timber?
Greg

Greg, old timer timber millers down this way reckon that if you could distill whatever it is in jarrah that termites hate, it would be a great wood protecting agent. The buggers won't bother clean jarrah. They'll skim an oxidised surface and munch on jarrah rot wood, but not clean jarrah. One of the reasons jarrah was favored for structural timber in houses. As opposed to the local Karri, which is "stronger", but the termites love the stuff.

Richard

Originally Posted by Zed

nothing like living up to the name is there knucklehead?

Zed I am afraid that I have done dumber things than that in the past. In fact its probably not the dumbest thing I have done this month!