subject: Carpenter Ants: Discover How To Handle Them [print this page] Black carpenter ants are the most common kind of ant pest in the United States. As their name implies, they are often found in rotting logs or tree stumps in your backyard, but they can also have nests in and around your home. While they don't eat wood, they burrow through it and create different tunnels to go about their daily business. As you can imagine, this tunneling can compromise the structural integrity of any wood in your home.
Carpenter ants come in all different sizes, because they all serve different purposes within their colony. They don't sting, but the large ones can bite if they feel threatened. You might be able to find a carpenter ant nest next to where there may be a food source for the ants in your home. Carpenter ants don't eat the wood they tunnel through like termites, but they do like proteins and sugars. They especially like things that are sweet, like honeydew. To kill a colony, bait that seems like a sweet food source is used, but the bait will have a toxic agent that will kill the members of the colony.
Just because you see a carpenter ant outside your home doesn't mean that you need to bug bomb your entire house. There are a number of clues to realize when you have a carpenter ant problem. If you notice a lot of winged ants in your home or you notice carpenter ants in the winter, you likely have a nest located inside your home. You can also find "frass" or the kind of saw dust that carpenter ants leave behind when they tunnel. If you do think that you have an ant problem, you can call a professional exterminator to come out and assess the situation.
Prevention is obviously a preferred method when it comes to carpenter ants. It is easier to keep them from entering your home than it is to remove them once they are there. One of the ways to do this is to make sure any wooden structures in your home are dry wood and not moist wood. Ants prefer moist wood, because they can actually chew through it. If the wood in your home is kept dry and structurally sound, they will avoid it. However, if there is already a nest, eliminating moisture in the wood will do little to help the problem.
To eliminate your carpenter ant problem, the nest needs to be located and the queen needs to be killed. You can buy sprays and crystals that the ants will take into nests thinking they are food and these will likely kill the queen and the rest of the colony. You can also have an exterminator come in and spray the exterior of your home on a yearly basis. Exterminators will often work with customers to build a relationship and rapport. You might be able to get a discount if you use the same exterminator for ant prevention from year to year.
