Envirosafe Pest Control · Belmont, North Carolina
The Daily Crawl
Went out for ants. The whole crawl space was coming down.
Ant call in Lowell. The crawl door was standing open, so we went in and had a look. The insulation had let go of the subfloor and was hanging in sheets, the rest of it was piled in the dirt, the vapor barrier was torn and buried, water was standing in the low spots, and a foundation vent screen was chewed wide open. Ants were the smallest problem on the property.
Insulation that falls turns into a wick. It holds water against the girders and the sheathing and never dries, so the wood stays wet and everything that eats wet wood gets an invitation. The floor and the subfloor above it are still sound, which is the good news.
Water first, then the vents, then the wood gets cleaned and treated, then the liner and new insulation go in. Any other order and you pay for it twice.
Crawl space moisture control →
Chewed foundation vent, Lowell
Screen torn wide open at the block line. That is a door for rodents and an open invitation for moisture to ride in behind them.
Rodent exclusion →
Growth on the girder
Wet wood grows this. It is the reason moisture gets fixed before anybody talks about insulation or a liner.
Termite control →Out on the route this week
Field Files · Case 194 · Catawba Heights, Belmont, NC
The Baffling Case of the Catawba Heights White Fairy Flies
A new Field File, told the way a 1962 drive-in picture would tell it. A panicked call from Catawba Heights, a neighbor walking over with her arms folded, and two back yards full of little white things drifting like ash and dancing with the fireflies at dusk. Three clues, and nobody bitten. What were they?
Six and a half minutes, narrated. The call, the walk down to Southern Roots, the fireflies, and the question you get to answer before we do.
Solve it before we do. Field Files, Case 194: The Baffling Case of the Catawba Heights White Fairy Flies
Field Files · Case 193 · Flint Mill village, Gastonia, NC
The Secret Under the Old Mill House, the full case on video
The Flint Mill inspection below is now a Field File. Seven and a half minutes, narrated, done the way Encyclopedia Brown would have written it up: the 1907 mill that built the village, the plank clubhouse over the crawl space door with its hundreds of foam plugged carpenter bee holes, three clues, and a question you get to answer before we do.
Watch it here or read the full case file. Field Files, Case 193: The Secret Under the Old Mill House
Thu Sept 17 · Gastonia, NC · Flint Mill village · Termite inspection
What's under that old mill house
The mill houses around Flint Mill went up starting in 1907, built for the families who ran the spindles at the Flint Manufacturing Company. That is a lot of years for pine joists to sit a couple of feet above Gaston County red clay. The owner of one of them called us for a termite inspection, so we grabbed the flashlight and the probe and went looking for the way in.
The way in is its own story. Somebody in the old village built a plank lean-to over the crawl space door, rough boards and a tin roof, a makeshift gazebo that looks for all the world like a kids' clubhouse. Encyclopedia Brown would have hung a sign on it. Look close at the planks and you see the first problem before you ever get under the house: hundreds of carpenter bee holes, every one of them plugged with a squirt of hardware store foam by somebody who got tired of the bees. Foam does not stop carpenter bees. They drill right beside it. And around the base of the house there are openings a mouse walks through like a front door, which is exactly what they have been doing. Those get proofed.
First thing you notice under a real mill house is the old pane window set right into the foundation wall. Back then they vented the crawl space with actual glass windows, not screened vents. This one is still there, paint peeling off the mullions, still letting light in on a hundred years of dust.
Then the residents. Smokey brown roaches parked on the piers and the sill, the big glossy ones that come up out of leaf litter and love a damp crawl. Camel crickets by the dozen, hunched up on the block and jumping the second the light hits them. Both of them are telling you the same thing: this crawl space holds moisture, and moisture is what brings the next guest.
That guest was on the third pier. A mud tube running up the block and onto the wood, straight as a pencil line, and still damp. That is a working highway, subterranean termites moving between the soil and the joists of a house that has stood since the mill whistle blew. That is the reveal, and it is why you inspect instead of guess.
If your house went up when the mill did, it is worth a look. This one is getting a termite treatment, a moisture plan, a real carpenter bee treatment on the clubhouse, and the mouse openings sealed. The owner now knows exactly what is under that old mill house.
Fri Sept 18 · Belmont, NC · Ants · Green treatment
Green, Organic, and Eco-Friendly. Handling ants around the pool the natural way.
Backyard in Belmont with a pool, turf, stone walks and mulch beds all the way around. Ants were running the beds and showing up on the pool deck, and the last thing anybody wants around a pool is a liquid spray on the stone where the kids walk barefoot.
So this one got the green treatment. Niban is a granular bait made with boric acid, a naturally occurring mineral, in a weatherproof granule. We broadcast it by hand through the mulch beds, along the edge of the turf and around the base of the plantings. The ants pick it up as food, carry it back to the colony and share it. No spray, no odor, nothing on the pool deck.
It is one of the lowest toxicity products on the truck, it holds up to rain and irrigation, and it keeps working for weeks. When a customer asks for natural, eco friendly, organic minded pest control that still gets rid of the ants, this is what that looks like.
Green pest control is a real option, not a slogan. Bait the colony, skip the spray, and let the ants do the delivery.
Kings Mountain, NC · Termite trench · Found in the dirt
The grub the size of your thumb, and what it was really telling us
Trenching along a foundation for a termite treatment and the shovel turns up this: a fat, cream colored grub curled in a C, rust colored at the segments, dark head capsule, inches long. Bigger than any grub has a right to be. This is the larva of the eastern Hercules beetle, the biggest beetle in North Carolina, and it spends two years underground looking like this before it turns into the horned beetle people find on their porch light in July.
Here is the part that matters for your house. A Hercules grub eats rotting wood. Not roots, not sound lumber, not your framing. It lives in old stumps, buried logs and deep mulch, and it only shows up where wood is already breaking down. So finding one in a termite trench is not a termite problem and not a beetle problem. It is a note. It says there is decayed wood in the soil against this foundation, and decayed wood in wet ground is exactly what draws subterranean termites in the first place. The grub is the witness, not the suspect.
Not every grub gets that pass. The small white grubs you find in turf, the larvae of Japanese beetles, June beetles and masked chafers, are root feeders. Ten or more in a square foot and the lawn browns out in late summer and peels back like carpet, and then the raccoons, skunks and armadillos come dig it up to eat them. Those are a lawn treatment. This one is a shovel full of dirt, a stump to pull, and a moisture fix.
Found a giant grub? Send us a picture. Nine times out of ten it is one of these, and the answer is to deal with the rotten wood it was living in, not the grub.
Bessemer City, NC · Western Gaston County · New construction · Bora-Care wood pretreat
Bora-Care with dye on the bare framing. The termite treatment that goes in before the drywall.
New construction in Bessemer City, out in the western part of Gaston County. Studs still open, and that is the best moment there is to treat a house for termites. This is a Bora-Care wood pretreat. We spray the borate solution onto the bottom two feet of framing, the sill plates, the band, the subfloor edges and any wood that touches the foundation, and it soaks into the lumber instead of sitting on top of it. We mix a marking dye into the tank, so every stud we hit shows it. The builder can walk the house and see the coverage, and so can the inspector. No guessing about what got treated.
Borate is a mineral salt. Once it is in the wood it does not break down, it does not off gas, and it protects that framing for the life of the house against subterranean termites, drywood termites, carpenter ants, powderpost beetles and wood decay fungi. A termite that eats treated wood does not survive it, and a colony that runs into it does not build through it.
The soil pretreat protects the ground the house sits on. The wood pretreat protects the house itself. On a new build you can have both, and once the drywall goes up this window is closed for good. Builders in Bessemer City, Kings Mountain, Cherryville and the rest of western Gaston County who want the wood done, call before the insulation crew shows up.
Bora-Care new construction wood pretreat. Applied to the open framing with a marking dye, so what is protected is right there in plain sight.
Field Dispatch · Mount Holly, NC · Snake relocation
Snake relocation at a Mount Holly day care
Call came in from a day care with a snake up against the building. Nobody needed it dead, they needed it gone. Caught it, carried it out and turned it loose away from the playground.
We never kill a snake. Every snake we get called on gets caught and relocated, every time. They eat the rodents you do not want around the building, so moving them is better for you than killing them.
Most of what we pull off buildings in Gaston County is a black rat snake or a garter snake. They are after the mice living under the deck or in the mulch, and a snake against a wall usually means the rodents got there first. If you see one at a school, a day care or your house, leave it alone and call us. We will catch it, move it, and then go looking for what it was hunting.
Wed Sept 16 · Charlotte, NC · Myers Park · Carpenter bees
Carpenter bees, forty feet up on a Myers Park home
Massive house. That is our 40 foot fiberglass ladder run out to the max in the clip, because that is what it took to reach the wood molding that runs around the whole perimeter of the roof line. This house was extremely infested. Every run of that molding was full of perfect round holes, and it is trim somebody paid real money for.
Carpenter bees drill with the grain, then turn and run a gallery sideways through the board, so you see one hole and a foot of tunnel you cannot see. The dark streaking under each hole is not dirt. That is waste running down the finish, and it does not wash off. On a house this size the only way to know how bad it is, is to get up there and look at every foot of it.
Tue Sept 15 · Charlotte, NC · Myers Park · Carpenter bees
Carpenter bees in a Myers Park porch ceiling
Front and back covered porches on a Myers Park home, stained tongue and groove ceilings, about 550 square feet of wood between the two. The stain was fourteen years old and breaking down, and the bees had found it. Homeowners were watching them come and go every afternoon. First clip is the setup and the ceiling. Second clip is the holes getting plugged.
The bees are not the whole problem. Woodpeckers hear the larvae in there and open the boards up to get them, and every abandoned gallery is a door for water. Our fix on a ceiling like this is the same every time. Holes get packed with wood putty our crew treats with borates, through-holes get Xcluder stuffed in first so nothing comes back through a ready made tunnel, then putty over, matched to the stain as close as we can get it. Then every exposed and previously stained board gets Bora-Care mixed with Suspend PolyZone, brushed on by hand, so the wood stops being worth drilling.
Tue Sept 15 · Ranlo, NC · Asian needle ants
Asian needle ants, and why you never see them coming
Most ant calls start with a customer pointing at a line of ants on the counter. Asian needle ants do not give you that. No trails, no mound in the yard, no column to follow back to the nest. They wander alone or in loose bunches, which is why people do not know they have them until somebody gets stung.
Flip over what is laying in the yard and you find them. That clip is what was under the first thing we turned over: a whole brood, hundreds of pupae piled on the wet wood, workers scrambling to carry them off. Under stones, under sticks, in mulch beds, under landscape timbers, in old stumps, down in the damp leaf litter along the foundation. And they do not run one nest with one queen. They build supercolonies with multiple queens spread across a yard or a whole street, which is why the problem never stays on one property.
The sting is no joke. It can hurt for hours and in some people it sets off a real allergic reaction. The baits that clean up a kitchen ant problem get ignored by these, because they are predators, not sugar feeders. They have to be found where they nest and treated there, along with the conditions that made the yard attractive in the first place.
Gastonia, NC · New construction pretreat · Commercial
We treated the ground the Carolina Cat building sits on
Before it was a state of the art dealership it was a red clay pad with dump trucks running on it, and that is when we were out there. Carolina Cat's new Gastonia branch got its termite pretreat from Envirosafe while the site was still dirt, which is the only time you can do it right. Once the slab is down, the ground under it is off the table forever.
A commercial pretreat is not one visit. You treat the footings when they are open, you come back and treat the pad before the vapor barrier and the slab go down, and you treat the perimeter after the walls are up. Every trip gets logged with the product, the rate and the gallons, because the builder needs a clean record for the certificate.
They cut the ribbon this past June, in the middle of the company's hundredth anniversary year, and the building serves all of western North Carolina. The people walking in the front door will never think about what is under the concrete. That is the point. A pretreat done right is invisible for the life of the building.
Building in Gaston or Mecklenburg County? Call before the footings are poured. We handle the pretreat, the paperwork and the follow up visits so your inspector signs off the first time.
Gastonia, NC · Loray Mill · Termite pretreat
Under the Loray Mill
Gastonia's biggest building, and we are the ones who treat it. Envirosafe holds the termite protection contract on Loray Mill and did the termite pretreatment for the renovation, which meant trips back through the summer to hit foundations as each phase opened up. You cannot pretreat a building like this in one visit. You go when the contractor gives you access, you treat what is exposed, and you come back when the next section is open.
Down in the basement it is all hand laid brick and arched openings, and what is down there is something nobody living in those apartments will ever see. Old mill, new apartments, same foundation, and the termites have been working that ground since long before either one.
Building or renovating in Gaston or Mecklenburg County? Termite soil pretreatment for new construction, done in phases as the site opens up, with the paperwork your inspector needs.
Gastonia, NC · Termite swarm · Found in time
A swarm, found in time
This is what an active subterranean colony looks like the day it finally shows itself. Thousands of swarmers piled along an interior sill in a Gastonia home. The homeowner did not have a termite problem the day before, as far as they knew. They had one for years. This was just the first time the colony sent anybody upstairs.
Swarmers come out in spring, usually after a warm rain, and they pile up on sills, window ledges and slab edges because they are chasing light. They are not the ones eating the house. The workers are, and they never come out. By the time you see a swarm like this, the colony has been feeding on the structure long enough to be big enough to split.
The wings are the tell. Termite swarmers drop them in piles. Flying ants do not. If you find a pile of clear wings on a sill, or a mound of dead bugs like this one, do not vacuum it up and forget it. Call us the same day. The swarm is the only warning you get for free.
Mount Holly, NC · Case 191 · Yellow-legged hornets
Yellow-legged hornet nest in a Mount Holly cornice
The call came in as a bad yellow-legged hornet problem at a house near Mountain Island Lake. Rodney suited up in full gear, ran a camera up on a pole to size the nest before anybody went near it, and found the face of it about fifteen inches across and nine inches tall, with another fifteen inches running back inside the soffit.
What was living in it was not what the caller thought. Here's what we found and how it was safely resolved.
Belmont, NC · Chronicle Mill · Soil barrier
Soil barrier at the Chronicle Mill site
Liquid termite protection applied prior to the concrete pour on new construction. Envirosafe has worked Chronicle Mill on and off for years, back to when the Churches first bought it, through the stretch when plenty of people doubted the project would ever get finished.
The soil pretreatment went down in the spring of 2021, before the concrete was poured. That is the only time you can do it right.
Fri Sept 19 · Opinion · What we do not do
The greenest guy on the internet, pouring out of a party cup
The entire pitch is safety. Softer chemistry. Safer around the family. Safer around the pets. Something you would not mind your kid being near.
Then the product goes into a red Solo cup.
Think about what that says. The man selling you on how gentle his chemistry is just told the whole industry he does not care what he pours it into. Food and beverage containers are off limits on the label of damn near everything on your truck, and he skipped it for a camera angle. Every licensed applicator watching knew it inside two seconds.
That is the irony. He is not proving the product is safe. He is proving the product has to be, because the handling sure is not. Green chemistry is his margin for error, and he is spending it on content.
And a homeowner does not take away "great product." A homeowner takes away "you can put that stuff in a cup." Cup on the tailgate, cup on the step, and we all know one story about how that ends. Nobody in it thought it would be them either.
A measuring cup is two dollars. If you are going to build a brand on being the safe guy, start with the container.
See a job in your town? That is who your neighbors are calling. We will come look at yours.
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