Bart Bruni of Bestec Exterminators in Hallandale Beach, Florida, runs an active extermination business, with more than 3,000 accounts, 50 percent of which are subterranean termite accounts. 90 percent of their subterranean termite accounts are treating for Formosan termites (coptotermes formosanus), and the majority of those are commercial accounts.

“We offer a $250,000 wood damage guarantee on every formosan termite agreement,” says Bruni.

What makes him so confident? Research and all the right tools, including a canine, and as he says, “putting my money where my mouth is.”

Bruni is an industry cooperator for many major chemical companies and is working with FMC in Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services trials funded by the Department of Agriculture. He's tested every baiting system on the market and concludes: “No one has a better system than FMC.”

He sees two trends in baiting systems. One is a new baiting matrix that causes termites to hit more readily. The other trend is the design of bait stations so that they cause the least interruptions to the activity. Bruni says that the less handling, the better. He enthusiastically awaits FMC's new Defender™ unit, a triple-chamber housing that can hold a combination of FirstLine® GT Plus Termite Bait Stations and Monitoring Stations.

Bruni's perspective is that a baiting system is successful if it stops activity in a structure. “I'm not concerned with killing every termite in town,” he says. “For me it has to be relative to the house or structure. If termites are active in the structure, I don't use baiting systems alone. Having two barriers in place and stopping the activity in the structure is the only measure of success.”

Bestec also employs every tool it can to prevent termite damage, including the use of a termite-sniffing Beagle. “We sweep a house every 90 days to determine if there's a problem or not. We treat as best we can with a tight treatment program, and we take our time. We're very expensive ($10 to $12 per running foot, versus $3 to $7 per foot). We look to see where we haven't delivered material, and we try to be there when the bug comes through.”

The Beagle was food-trained by a specialist in a 10-month program to find termites. So even on his days off, Bruni's pet has to sniff out termites before he eats.

“To him it's a game. He knows, when I bring out the containers of live termites, ‘We're gonna do it in this house.' It's not foolproof, but it makes the customer satisfied, and he has caught a lot of activity at jobs that we wouldn't have known about. It saved us and the homeowner a lot of work.

“We have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure we protect people's most prized possessions-their homes.”

FMC thanks Bestec Exterminators of Hallandale Beach, Florida for sharing this success story.