There was a bloke at Albion Park who did everything a reasonable person would do. Warm night in late November, thunderstorm had come through about six, and by eight o'clock there were a couple of hundred flying insects around the light in the living room and a drift of them on the windowsill. He shut the window, vacuumed the lot, wiped the sill down and went to bed annoyed.
I met him the following October, because a skirting board in that room had gone soft under a thumbnail.
He hadn't been careless. Nobody has ever told him the difference, and at arm's length under a ceiling light there genuinely isn't one you'd notice. But those insects had come up through a gap in the slab beside a plumbing penetration, which means the colony was already under the house in November and had another eleven months to get on with it.
Ten seconds, three things
You need one of them on a windowsill and reasonable light. A phone camera zoomed right in does the job.
The wings. This is the giveaway and it's the easiest. A termite alate has four wings, all the same size and shape, and they're long — noticeably longer than the body, laid flat over each other like a pair of scissors. A flying ant has a big front pair and a small back pair. Once you've seen the difference you can't unsee it.
The waist. An ant is pinched in the middle, that classic wasp-waisted shape. A termite is a straight tube from front to back with no nip in it at all.
The antennae. Ant antennae have an elbow, a clear bend partway along. Termite antennae are straight and look like a tiny string of beads.
There's a fourth tell that isn't about the insect. Termite alates shed their wings almost immediately after landing, so you get little piles of identical discarded wings on the sill, in the sink, along the window track, sometimes still stuck together in pairs. If you're finding wings without bodies, that's your answer. The Australian Museum's page on termites has decent close-up photography if you want to compare against what you've got.
When it happens here
Warm, humid evening, usually after rain, usually October through December along this coast. It can run into January in a wet summer. They fly at dusk and they go straight for light, which is why the first anyone knows about it is a swarm around the outside light or the TV.
Ants swarm too, and at similar times. Coastal brown ants and black house ants both do nuptial flights after a hot spell, and those really are just ants — a nuisance for an evening, gone by morning, and if they're a recurring problem that's the material in getting rid of ants in the Illawarra rather than anything to worry about structurally.
So the swarm on its own doesn't mean anything. What it is, does.
Inside versus outside
This distinction matters more than people expect.
If the alates came out of a crack in the slab, a weep hole, an architrave, a bathroom cabinet or a cornice — anywhere inside the building envelope — the colony is in or under the structure. That's not a maybe. Alates don't fly in through a closed window; they emerge from the nest, and if they emerged in your living room the nest is attached to your living room.
If they turned up around the outside light or the pergola and there's a bush block or an old stump over the fence, that's less alarming. It still tells you there's an established colony within flying distance and they're actively looking for new sites, one of which is your place.
Either way it's an inspection, not an emergency. The difference is how fast.
What to do before you vacuum
Keep some. Sticky tape a few onto a piece of paper, or scoop a dozen into a jar. It sounds fussy and it settles the question in about a minute when someone competent looks at them, which beats reconstructing it from memory in ten months.
Photograph where they came out. Not the insects — the gap. That's the bit that tells us where to start.
Then leave the area alone. Do not spray it. This is the same rule as finding live workings in a wall, and it matters for the same reason: a repellent knockdown from a can kills the ones you can see, tells the colony that route is bad, and they simply go around and set up somewhere else in the building where nobody is looking. You've turned a locatable problem into an unlocatable one for the price of an aerosol. There's more on why in what termite treatment costs and what you're actually paying for.
And don't panic about the timeline. An alate flight isn't damage happening that evening. It's evidence about damage that's been happening quietly for a while.
Why the Illawarra gets it
Subterranean termites need warmth, moisture and timber in contact with soil, and we're generous with all three. Coastal humidity, plenty of old weatherboard and hardwood-framed brick veneer, escarpment bush running up against the back fences, and gardens full of the things they love — sleepers, timber retaining walls, an old stump nobody got out, mulch heaped against the brickwork.
New builds aren't exempt, they're just managed. Any house built to the current rules has a termite management system under and around it, done to AS 3660.1 and required by the NCC's termite risk management provisions. The system doesn't kill anything. It forces termites to come up somewhere visible. Which works beautifully until someone builds a garden bed over the slab edge, and I've written out the six normal, well-intentioned Saturday jobs that undo it in how people break a new home's termite barrier.
The honest answer about frequency
Annual, for almost every house between Helensburgh and Nowra. Not because it's a nice round number, but because a colony that flies in November was there in the previous summer, and twelve months is roughly the window in which you can still be talking about a treatment instead of a carpenter.
Two years between inspections in this climate is a gamble. Five years is a story I get told while I'm sounding a wall.
What actually happens on the visit — moisture meters, sounding, the roof void, the subfloor, the fence line and the stumps — plus what moves the price, is set out in what a termite inspection costs in the Illawarra.
Right now is the useful bit
We're about six weeks out from the start of flight season. A house inspected in late winter, with the slab edge clear and the timber off the ground, is a poor prospect. The same house in December with a swarm in the kitchen is a much longer conversation.
If you found wings on a windowsill last summer and did nothing, that's the one I'd act on. If you're not sure what you found, send us a photo or ring and describe where they came out, and book a timber pest inspection if it warrants one. The Albion Park job, for what it's worth, was still a treatment rather than a rebuild. Just.
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