Is it poo or what?

[DTisme]

Any entomologists out there? Two mornings in a row I have found a dinner-plate-sized area, maybe even larger, of teeny weeny black-and-brown somethings on our tile floor. This is in the middle of the floor, not near the baseboards, about 2 feet from windows. They are nowhere else in the house. I put them on my scanner so you can see how teeny this stuff is...

http://i1014.photobucket.com/albums/af26...r_what.jpg

Is it poo? Is it seeds? What the heck IS it? Any theories? They look like teeny tiny poos to me, but too small for cockroaches, even the small ones. Smaller than even poppy seeds. And there's hundreds if not thousands of them. Could they have come off my little dog? He has been itching, but flea comb doesn't turn up anything, and he never goes to this part of the room because it's sorta off the beaten path

At first I thought they might have fallen from the ceiling, but careful scientific investigation (dropping some from a piece of paper) tells me they couldn't have fallen that far without spreading out a lot farther. There's a low coffee table nearby, but not above the patch o' dots.

A few months back I found a bunch of little black dots in a bathroom floor at the baseboard and looked thru lupe at them and saw they were dead ants (ants take their dead to one place). But these ain't ants.

[Rene]

Looks like termite droppings.

[PaulW]

Yep, termites.

[Kapohocat]

it's poo.... also called frass.

[Carey]

If they are dry, & feel like tiny cylinders when you rub them between your fingers, most likely Drywood Termite Frass - droppings (wet or mushy may be carpenter ant droppings). The frass color is darker than the wood eaten, light wood may be lighter, but most of the frass around here is darker (more like coffee grounds)

Most likely there is a pinhole in something above the area that the frass is found (look carefully at furniture in the close by area, or in the ceiling) that the termites are using to kick out the frass
Good info link:
http://www.aces.edu/pubs/docs/A/ANR-1170/ANR-1170.pdf

[missydog1]

I was once told by a termite inspector that the termite droppings can be pushed out of an area where there WERE termites by live ants, that the ants like to move in to areas the termites have hollowed out.

You want to figure out how fresh the termite frass might be.

[hotinhawaii]

Look again at the pellets with your lupe. Are they six sided?
"Fecal pellets are distinctive and used for identification of drywood termite infestation. Drywood fecal pellets are hard, elongated and less than 1/25 inch long. They have rounded ends and six flattened or concavely depressed sides with ridges at angles between the six surfaces. The characteristic shape results when the termite exerts pressure on the fecal material to extract and conserve moisture in its hindgut. Typically the pellets are a light tan in color with some black ones mixed in."
from http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/insects/az1232/

[ericlp]

if it's in a pile (neatly) like a mound it's termites... Get it tented pronto!

[DTisme]

Thanks all - away from internet for a few days here so I apologize for not replying. Yup, termite poo. A neighbor confirmed. We realized we'd done a lot of hammering close by building some shelving and probably opened up the cracks between the overhead tongue and groove wood. -- I'm hoping it's old droppings, but we sprayed termite insecticide all through the cracks -- yes, after banging on the wood above, they came trickling out of there. I can't seem to get any more to come out, so each morning I recheck the area. So far, so good. The house was tented 8 years ago but might need it again. We'll just keep an eye on it. If we see more, we'll get termite guy in here pronto. Hotinhawaii, not sure about the 6-sided thing. My eyes are getting old!

[macuu222]

We just decided to let the termites have our house (eventually). We are retired and own our home in HPP and its over 25 years old and we never have had termite control people come out. We do have termite piles...mostly around window framing where soft wood was used and in our kitchen. And we use orange oil to keep it under control. We have no offspring to pass down our home and refuse to give money to the pest contol people for the rest of our lives. When it goes...it goes. Hopefully we'll both be gone before that happens.