Carpenter Ants
It is about this moment 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 ( often times red and black) ants can vary from one-quarter 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 associated to bees, wasps, and sawflies.
Carpenter ants share with just one annoying addiction with termites. They construct broad nests in wood, including logs, stumps, tree trunks, telephone poles, and, regrettably, buildings. Nests are usually begun in deteriorating timber that has been exposed to moisture. Often, the colony will extend its nest to adjacent, sound wood.
The colonies of carpenter ants are oftentimes 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, giving them food to eat 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 contains 2,000 or more workers. It could take a colony from three to six years or greater to reach this stage. Annually 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 injury 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 open to fungus, rots, and various forms of decay. Some recent evidence shows that they can also cause encompassing harm to foam heat retaining material. If faced with chewing through hard timber or soft insulating material to constructor your nest, which would you pick out?
Finding carpenter ants indoors in the wintertime is a sign that they're nesting somewhere within the walls or floors of the building. This is owing to the fact that carpenter ants, like all insects, are cold blooded. Ants active in the wintertime must be originating from a warmed source. Although the air temperature outside is freezing cold, heat from the sunlight or your furnace or timber stove may warm your property walls and stir overwintering ants to activity. Ants located 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 available 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 unthinkable 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 of the reasons we encourage carpenter control by direct nest remedy is to limit the quantity of pesticide applied. Frequently, we can acquire the ants to assist with the therapy.
Their zest for sweets can be their downfall. About 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 sort of ant you are managing 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.