“Termites” isn’t one problem — it’s two very different ones, and confusing them wastes money on the wrong treatment. Here’s the short version: subterranean termites live in the soil and tunnel up into your house, while drywood termites live entirely inside the wood they’re eating — and because one has a soil colony and the other doesn’t, they’re treated in completely different ways. Get the species wrong and you can pour a soil barrier around a house whose problem is sitting in an antique cabinet. This guide covers how to tell them apart, which one you’re more likely to have in Malaysia, and what the right treatment looks like for each.

What’s the difference between the two?

Both are termites, both eat cellulose (wood), and both have a queen at the centre of the colony. The difference is where they live and how they reach their food — and everything else, including how you treat them, follows from that.

Subterranean termites: the common one

This is the termite the vast majority of Malaysian homeowners are dealing with. Coptotermes gestroi and the more aggressive Coptotermes curvignathus nest underground, where the warm, damp soil suits them, and their colonies grow into the millions. Because they need to keep moist, they can’t just walk across open ground and air — they build mud tubes, pencil-width tunnels of soil, to travel from the nest up into your skirting, door frames and structural timber.

They eat along the grain of the wood and leave soil and mud packed into their galleries, and they do it from the ground up. This is the termite behind almost all serious structural damage here, and because the colony is huge and hidden in the soil, it keeps coming until the colony itself is dealt with. The early signs — mud tubes, hollow timber, swarms after rain — are the ones we cover in what mud tubes on a wall mean and termite swarm season.

Drywood termites: the furniture one

Drywood termites (Cryptotermes) play a different game entirely. They live their whole lives inside a piece of wood — no soil, no mud tubes, almost no moisture required. A single piece of furniture, a door frame, a roof beam or a wooden fixture can host a colony that never touches the ground. That’s also how they spread into a home in the first place: often by hitchhiking in a piece of infested second-hand or imported timber that gets carried straight through your front door.

Their signature sign is frass — dry fecal pellets, gritty like coarse sand or coffee grounds, that the termites push out of tiny “kick-out” holes to keep their galleries clean. You’ll find little piles of it on the floor directly below the infested wood, on a shelf, or on a window sill. No mud tubes, no soil, just the neat pellet piles and, if you tap the wood, a hollow sound. Colonies are far smaller than subterranean ones, so the damage is slower and more localized — but hidden inside a beam, it can still get advanced before you spot the pellets.

A homeowner in Ampang was sure she had a termite emergency — little piles of “sawdust” kept appearing under an old teak cabinet she’d bought second-hand. It wasn’t the subterranean job she feared and it wasn’t in her walls at all: drywood termites living inside that one piece. We treated the cabinet directly instead of the house. Right species, right treatment, a fraction of the cost she’d braced for.

— Job notes, Nomobug field team