Carpenter Ants
It is about this moment of year that folks start seeing insects wandering around inside their houses. One of the more noticeable of these insects is the carpenter ant.
These chunky black ( occasionally red and black) ants can range from a quarter inch for worker ants up to three-fourths 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 intimately linked to bees, wasps, and sawflies.
Carpenter ants share with just one annoying characteristic with termites. They construct broad nests in wood, including logs, stumps, tree trunks, telephone poles, and, regrettably, buildings. Nests are usually begun in deteriorating wood that has been exposed to moisture. Often, the colony will extend its nest to adjacent, sound timber.
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 timber. She then rears her first brood 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 becomes more constant, the colony population grows very rapidly. A colony does not reach maturity and become proficient at producing young queens and males until it contains 2,000 or more workers. It may take a colony from three to six years or longer to reach this stage. Yearly 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 open to fungus, rots, and different varieties of decay. Some recent evidence shows that they can also cause broad harm to foam insulating material. If faced with chewing through hard wood or soft insulating material to constructor your nest, which would you select?
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 thanks to the truth that carpenter ants, like all insects, are cold blooded. Ants active in the winter must be originating from a warmed source. Even though the air temperature outside is chilly, heat from the sun or your furnace or wood 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 looking for food or drink. In the spring, carpenter ants go through a mass-mating or swarming behavior. During this time carpenter ants raid houses searching 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 aspect in carpenter ant control is treating the nesting area. Locating the nest site is very rarely easy and there are times it may be hopeless to locate the nest. The most probable 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 a reason we encourage carpenter control by direct nest therapy is to limit the volume of pesticide applied. Frequently, we can acquire the ants to help out with the therapy.
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 can 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.
