Malaysian domestic animals 2

Daddy has been busy again. The kitchen cupboards were full of soft, white-bodied insects. They look exactly like the termites on wikipedia. They seemed to be hiding in between the IKEA base units and the concrete-and-tile worktop. After a few days of cleaning and spraying, and the termites increasing in number every day, daddy took out the base units. Interesting! The first picture is underneath the hob, with the oven removed. Can you see the tunnel made of sand (or dirt, or dust?) from the top of the cupboard, going upwards across the concrete worktop?


The second picture is where the power leads for the hob and oven are connected. Can you see the dust around the edge of the cover, to the right? The termites put the dust there to cover them as they crawl from the panel into the cupboard side. It seems like they used the pre-drilled holes for the shelf-supporting pegs to get into the chipboard.

Daddy used a syringe to squirt lots of termite poison into the wall, before sealing it in there with caulk. My daddy is the caulking king!


Once they got into the chipboard, they ate it - the third picture is the edge of one of the cupboard sides. Daddy threw some of the kitchen away and made some new bits out of the 'leftovers' from when the kitchen was new. IKEA base units are hard to fit into a concrete kitchen and worktop, but daddy has a saw and caulk, and he's not afraid to use them! That happened a couple of weeks ago, and there's no reappearance of termites in the kitchen. The livingroom door frames have plenty, daddy was pulling trim off one last week, when it suddenly pinged off the wall, covering him with dozens of live termites. A pity we didn't get a picture.