Sentricon

Looking for termites can be an infuriating game of hide and seek. Termites hardly ever announce they are there although you can spot them with the help of some telltale signs. To avoid this hassle, request a thorough inspection from a professional pest controller before termites invade your house.

The Sentricon system is developed as a termite colony elimination system. For a colony elimination system to be effective, the bait has to affect each termite within the colony. A specific kind of termite—the worker termite—carries out all the foraging of food. Thus, it’s the type that the Sentricon targets. The worker termites are in charge of feeding their nestmates. They make this happen by ingesting food themselves and then feeding the other members of the colony through the mouth. This exact natural routine of termites is utilized by the system to spread the bait throughout the nest.

You should be aware that the bait can’t work too quickly. If the active component killed the working termites prematurely, they would die before even passing the bait to other colony members. The active component in the Sentricon bait is called the noviflumuron which is a slow acting chitin synthesis inhibitor. Noviflumuron is a particular insect growth regulator or IGR. An IGR meddles with the pest’s external development. This specific IGR disrupts the termite’s capacity to molt.

The skeleton of most insects is positioned on the outside of their body. This is called an exoskeleton. To be able to grow bigger, termites must regularly shed this exoskeleton in a process called molting. Noviflumuron disables the termite to molt effectively so it dies along the way. When Noviflumuron is transferred from one termite to another, the afflicted termites die on their next molt. Soon enough, there will not be enough termites left to care for the colony and nourish the queen. Once the queen dies, the termite colony is exterminated.