Quite a few people are said to keep a secret in their closet.
Turns out one Castlemaine area woman had a secret in her closet she didn’t even know was there.
But when Karen Micallef recently shifted a suitcase that had been sitting beside her closet, all that was about to change.
“I looked down and I thought – ‘Oh my gosh! What’s that coming out of my wardrobe?’ Karen shared.
A mound of soil-like material was piled in a heap beside the wardrobe and when she opened it, Karen was shocked to discover a stack of more of the same strange material.
“It was actually quite frightening,” the local resident said.
Some emergency enquiries followed and soon revealed the source of the strange material.
Termites.
Soon after that, Karen got in touch with Campbells Creek based pest controller Kim Odgers who specialises in termite control.
“He used some fairly colourful language when we took up the floorboards and he saw the size of the termite nest underneath the house,” said Karen who is now keen to warn others about the potential hazard of termites in old houses built on, or close to, the ground like hers.
Contacted to shed more light on the matter, Kim said the termite nest that had been quietly growing beneath Karen’s house was definitely one of the biggest he’d ever seen in quarter of a century of pest control.
“It’s huge. Definitely one of the biggest termite nests I’ve ever seen under a house – definitely,” said Kim.
He said termites could typically become a problem for older buildings where the floor was on, or close to, the ground creating poor ventilation, and moisture didn’t help either.
“They can be chewing away and the home owner doesn’t realise they’re there,” Kim said.
“For about the past 20 years Mount Alexander has required all new buildings to have termite protection so they’re not a problem in the newer buildings.
“They’re easy to deal with if we can get at them,” said Kim, noting that in Karen’s case, they’d need to take up some of her lovely Kauri pine floorboards to deal with this one.
“The material she found was actually their excretion that they use to build their nest out of. It sets really hard,” Kim said.
“It’s very unusual to find something in the wardrobe like this, so for quite while they’ve just been building the nest up bigger and bigger up into the house.
“It takes them about 12 months to chew around a doorframe. They store the glucose out of the timber and take it out to feed the nest.
“Fortunately for her, her walls are solid brick.
“In Victoria we have three types of termites – and two of them will attack your house.
“Just be glad ours aren’t like the termites in Queensland. They can bring a house down in six months.”
