Pest Control St. Louis

It is about this occasion of year that folks start seeing insects wandering around inside their houses. One of the more visible of these insects is the carpenter ant.

These chunky black ( often times red and black) ants can vary from a fourth 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 features distinguish them from the thick-waisted termites with their straight antennae. Ants are closely linked to bees, wasps, and sawflies.

Carpenter ants share with just one annoying habit with termites. They construct encompassing nests in timber, including logs, stumps, tree trunks, telephone poles, and, unfortunately, buildings. Nests are commonly 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 often long lived. A single fertilized queen founds each colony. She establishes a nesting site in a cavity in wood. She then rears her first breed 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 job of gathering food with which to feed the younger larvae. As the food supply grows 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 contains 2,000 or more workers. It may take a colony from three to six years or more to reach this stage. Yearly thereafter, the colony will continue to 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 different types of decay. Some recent evidence indicates that they can likewise cause extensive injury to foam insulating material. If faced with chewing through hard timber or soft insulating material to build your nest, which would you choose?

Finding carpenter ants indoors in the wintertime is a sign that they are nesting somewhere within the walls or floors of the building. This is because of the truth that carpenter ants, like all insects, are cold blooded. Ants active in the winter must be originating from a warmed source. Even if the air temperature outside is freezing, heat from the sun or your furnace or timber stove may warm your house walls and stir overwintering ants to activity. Ants located in the spring and summer are often invaders wandering in from outdoors looking for food or drink. In the spring, carpenter ants go through a mass-mating or swarming behavior. During this occasion carpenter ants raid houses searching for sweets, because one of their normal sources of sugar, the sweet honeydew from aphids, is not available until the weather warms up.

The critical aspect in carpenter ant control is treating the nesting area. Locating the nest site is very seldom easy and there are times it might 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 of the goals of Integrated Pest Management and one good reason we encourage carpenter control by direct nest treatment is to limit the amount of pesticide applied. Oftentimes, we can acquire the ants to aid with the treatment.

Their love of sweets may be their downfall. One of the most effective 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 treating since some ant species prefer different foods. Baits are formulated to work with certain species and will most likely specify which ones on the label.