Do you notice a high number of large black ants on your property? Do you have numerous trees on your property?
We call those huge black ants carpenter ants, and they burrow tunnels into wood objects as they construct their colonies. We call them carpenter ants since they operate in wood.
Carpenter ants destroy the tree they call house, but this destructive procedure takes several years. More than that period of years the tunneling weakens the structure of the tree, and ultimately the tree comes crashing down. (Hopefully the tree isn’t so close that it smashes your house when it falls.)
The ants don’t eat the wood like termites do. What wood they take away as they tunnel, they discard as sawdust through tiny openings to the outside. Colony growth, requiring expansion of the house, and a lot more tunneling, results in the removal of so a lot inner wood that structural weakness takes place.
The queen selects the colony site, and when new queens are born they locate places to create satellite extensions of the colony.
These satellite colonies begin expanding in neighboring trees.
If you do not take action when you discover these guys in your yard someday you’ll own a bunch of dead trees.
Occasionally you see a few of these ants inside your home. They’re searching for food, which for the carpenter, consists of sweet, sugary substances such as captured insect juices, and honey nectar.
If you see excessive numbers of these ants in your residence, a queen is developing a satellite nest, and the structure of your house is in danger. Let this colony go untreated and, in time, your home will collapse because of harm from the tunneling activity.
The only way to successfully rid your property of carpenter ants is to dust the nest, and each satellite nest that exists.
Obtaining each and every nest is the first objective.
Your initial impulse is locating the ones inside your developing, but fully grasp that the original colony started in the trees, in a woodpile, or some other wooden object outside your house. If you only treat the ones inside the residence, colonies will maintain expanding till they start off new satellites inside in the close to future, and your ant dilemma will quickly return.
Appear for piles of sawdust close to where you see the most ant activity. Those mounds show you exactly where the tunneling is, and that activity indicates the location of the nest.
Squirt a great high quality carpenter ant dust into the holes, and slits, exactly where you discover the sawdust coming from. The worker ants walk via the dust, get it on their legs, and spread it about as they travel via the colony. As they transfer the dust to other ants the dust, those ants ingest it when they clean themselves, and the ingested dust kills off the ants.
When you see growing numbers of these huge black ants, be rapid to uncover, and treat, the nest just before they threaten your landscape — and your home.