Structural
Termite control, treated as a structure and not as a sighting.
Trained applicators, a perimeter treatment, and a year of free inspection and re-treatment written into the job.
Chapter 01
Termites are found in the structure, not in the room
Almost nobody calls about termites because they saw a termite. They call because a floor sounds wrong, because a strip of trim gave under a thumbnail, or because something turned up during a remodel. One of our reviewers found hers while remodelling a basement. By that point the colony has been working the slab line, the sill plate or the block wall for a while, quietly, in the dark, inside the wood.
That is why the treatment is a perimeter job rather than a room job. Wherever the structure meets the ground is where the access is, and that is the line Bentson works: the footing, the trench along it, the block wall above it, the places a gallery can climb without ever crossing open air.
Mud tubes are the one part of the operation that shows. They are earth galleries built up a foundation wall so workers can travel protected. Finding them is useful. It is not the whole picture, and treating only where they show is how a job gets repeated.
Dried termite mud tubes running up a concrete block foundation beside an opened treatment trench
What the annual warranty actually commits us to
Termite service from Bentson carries an annual warranty: free inspection and free re-treatment for a year after the work. If activity comes back inside that year, we come back and treat it again, and the inspection that establishes it does not cost anything either.
The reason the commitment is written that way rather than as a guarantee of eradication is that the honest position on a structure is that it gets watched, not signed off. A house sits on soil, and soil has termites in it. What a treatment does is make the structure a bad route. What the warranty does is put our name on that for a year and make coming back our problem instead of yours.
This is a different warranty from the ten-year one on bed bug mattress encasement, and the two get confused. Encasement is a product with a ten-year warranty. Termite service is a treatment with a one-year inspection and re-treatment warranty.
Chapter 03
Who does the applying, and why the training keeps going
Termite treatment is applied by professionally trained applicators, and the training is ongoing rather than a certificate collected once. Products change, label requirements change, and the technique for getting material where it needs to be around a footing is not the same on a poured slab as it is on a block foundation over a crawl space.
Bentson positions itself as the premier termite treating company in the tri-state area, and has been doing this work in Sioux City since 1975. That is the claim the company makes for itself, and the fifty-one years behind it are checkable.
Getting an estimate costs nothing
Call the office and describe what you found and where you found it. Where in the house, what it looked like, what you were doing when you noticed. If there is a photograph, better.
Termite estimates are free. If you are looking at this because a sale is in progress rather than because something turned up in your own basement, the Wood Destroying Insect report is the other side of this work and has its own page.
Bentson Pest Management, Sioux City since 1975. Estimates are free. Call 877-276-2769.