Carpenter Ants
It is about this period of year that folks start seeing insects wandering around inside their houses. One of the more evident of these insects is the carpenter ant.
These chunky black ( occasionally red and black) ants can range from twenty five percent inch for worker ants up to three-quarters of an inch for the queen. Like all types of ants, carpenter ants have a constricted hourglass waist and elbowed antennae. These traits distinguish them from the thick-waisted termites with their straight antennae. Ants are closely related to bees, wasps, and sawflies.
Carpenter ants share at least one annoying addiction with termites. They construct encompassing nests in wood, including logs, stumps, tree trunks, telephone poles, and, unfortunately, buildings. Nests are ordinarily begun in deteriorating wood that has been exposed to moisture. Often, the colony will extend its nest to adjacent, sound wood.
The colonies of carpenter ants are frequently long lived. A single fertilized queen founds each colony. She establishes a nesting site in a cavity in wood. She then rears her first hatch of workers, feeding them salivary secretions. She does not leave the nest nor feed herself throughout this period. The workers who are reared first assume the chore of gathering food with which to feed the younger larvae. As the food supply gets to be more constant, the colony population grows very rapidly. A colony does not reach maturity and become capable of producing young queens and males until it incorporates 2,000 or more workers. It could take a colony from three to six years or more to reach this stage. Every year thereafter, the colony will carry on produce winged queens and males, which leave their nest and conduct mating flights in the spring and summer.
While termites actually eat and digest timber, carpenter ants simply chew and tunnel through it to build their homes. Carpenter ants rarely cause structural damage to buildings, although they can result in significant damage over a timescale of years because nests are so long lived. Damage by carpenter ants can leave household structural timber ready to accept fungus, rots, and several forms of decay. Some recent evidence suggests that they can likewise cause encompassing damage to foam insulation. If faced with chewing through hard wood or soft heat retaining material to build your nest, which would you pick out?
Finding carpenter ants indoors in the wintertime is an indication that they are nesting somewhere within the walls or floors of the building. This is owing to the truth that carpenter ants, like all insects, are cold blooded. Ants active in the wintertime must be originating from a warmed source. Even if the air temperature outside is wintery, heat from the sunlight or your furnace or wood stove may warm your house walls and stir overwintering ants to activity. Ants found in the spring and summer are often invaders wandering in from outdoors searching for food or drink. In the spring, carpenter ants go through a mass-mating or swarming behavior. During this period carpenter ants raid houses looking for sweets, because one of their normal sources of sugar, the sweet honeydew from aphids, is not accessible until the weather warms up.
The critical factor in carpenter ant control is treating the nesting area. Locating the nest site is very seldom easy and there are times it could be hopeless to locate the nest. The most likely sources of carpenter ants are window and door frames and sills, shower and tub enclosure walls, and kitchen and bath plumbing walls.
One or more of the objectives of Integrated Pest Management and one reason we encourage carpenter control by direct nest remedy is to limit the volume of pesticide applied. Frequently, we can acquire the ants to be of assistance to with the treatment.
Their love of sweets may be their downfall. About the most efficient ways to control carpenter ants is to set out poison baits. Attracted to the sweet taste, the worker ants collect the bait and bring it back to the colony, where they share it with the developing larvae and the queen.
It may be important to know what kind of ant you are dealing with since some ant species prefer different foods. Baits are formulated to work on certain species and will most likely specify which ones on the label.