Word: hexaflumuron
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...outright probably aren't good enough by themselves, says entomologist Ken Grace of the University of Hawaii. "If there's an area where others are dying, they'll wall it off and avoid it." So termite fighters are looking instead at slow poisons. One of the most promising is hexaflumuron, an insect-growth regulator that interferes with the termites' molting process. Bugs that have ingested the stuff don't notice any effects at first, so they spread it throughout a colony without suspecting they're under attack. Then, when it's time to shed their external skeletons and form...
...laying out and keeping track of hexaflumuron and other baited poisons is a time-consuming and costly process, and because the tactics are so new, no one knows for sure how effective they'll be. "We tend to look for magic bullets," says Grace. But controlling termites may require a combination of new techniques and old, including the traditional approach of applying powerful killers that can wipe out a building's worth of bugs at once...
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