Carpenter ants typically feed on sweets, meats, and small insects. Check your cupboards for potential ant food sources. If you have flour, sugar, cereals, grains, or other foods sitting out or unsealed in your cabinets, these can attract carpenter ants into your home.
Another reason you may be seeing carpenter ants is because wet conditions (often caused by damage from weather, plumbing issues, condensation, etc.) are prevalent in or around your home.
Flour or Chalk. Flour and chalk act as natural ant repellents. Calcium carbonate is the natural compound found in chalk. Calcium carbonate masks the scent trail of ants.
Not only are ants attracted to sugary foods, but they also need to have protein in their diet too. This means that if they should happen to smell raw or cooked meat in your home, they may come and check it out. Also, ants are going to be looking for greasy and oily foods as well.
To get rid of the ants naturally, simply mix water with dish soap in an empty spray bottle, such as this bottle from Amazon, and spray onto the affected area in your home. The solution is harmful and toxic to the carpenter ants so works a treat!
Carpenter ant infestations, whether minor or severe, can be handled by utilizing many of the same measures as other ant species. Ant bait, insecticide dust, and insecticidal spray are the most common ant management techniques.
All carpenter ants have wings, while not all black ants do. Black ants also have a single set of wings, if they have any at all, while carpenter ants have two sets of wings. While this is a subtle distinction, it is indeed a key difference between these two bugs.
The key to destroying a carpenter ant colony is to lure out the worker ants with bait, which they take back to the nest and poison the colony and the queen. When you spray the line of ants with insecticide, the ants at the nest aren't affected, and it could alert them to move to a different spot in your home.
Carpenter ants dislike strong scents like garlic, lavender, essential oils, and vinegar. These items might seem harmless for the nose of a human, but ants find these smells incredibly irritating. But aside from its irritating smell, vinegar also affects the behavior of carpenter ants.
But carpenter ants, the likely culprits, can still create havoc if ignored. One of the nation's most significant wood-damaging insect pests, along with carpenter bees and termites, carpenter ants can cause significant structural damage to your home.
These pests are not only an annoyance, but carpenter ants are also bad for your home, as they can cause serious wood damage to the structure. The sooner carpenter ants are treated, the less serious and expensive the damage is likely to be.
The main difference between the two is that termites actually consume the wood for sustenance, while carpenter ants don't. This makes carpenter ants less destructive than termites, since the damage they cause is limited to just excavating tunnels, whereas termite damage involves continuous, non-stop eating.
Carpenter ants nest in both moist and dry wood, but prefer wood which is moist. Consequently, the nests are more likely to be found in wood dampened by water leaks, such as around sinks, bathtubs, poorly sealed windows/ door frames, roof leaks and poorly flashed chimneys.
Another effective carpenter ant trap method is made from a non-toxic, non-staining solid bait that ants eat and bring back to the nest. This attracts other ants to eat it as well, eventually killing off the entire colony.
Carpenter ants are a fairly common species of ant. Since they often cause damage to wood, they can commonly be mistaken for termites. Of course, the primary difference between these insects is that termites eat wood, and carpenter ants only take shelter in wood.
Although it is not their primary diet, carpenter ants do occasionally feed on common sweets such as syrup, honey, jelly, sugar, salt, and fruit and would be attracted to the sugars in TERRO® liquid bait during these times. Once the ants drink the bait and share with the rest of the colony, the bait works it's magic.
Some people confuse any black ant with carpenter ants. For those who look closely at the ants and know that carpenter ants have a single node between their thorax and abdomen, field ants, crazy ants, and yellow ants have the same, which can cause some identification confusion for the amateur.
Follow Their Trails
You may sometimes figure out where a nest is by looking at the movement patterns of ants. More often than not, these trails will be coming from food sources within or around your home towards their nests in wood structures or trees.
A carpenter ant infestation within a building usually means that there is a moisture problem.
The pests use these holes as chutes to push carpenter ant frass out of the tunnels. This debris looks like wood shavings and forms a cone-shaped pile beneath the infested timber. Ant frass includes different materials, such as: Wood fragments.
Carpenter ants have a life expectancy of six to 12 weeks as they develop from eggs to adulthood, however cold weather can extend a carpenter ant's life cycle to as many as 10 months. Because of their short life cycle, it can take anywhere from three to six years to develop a sizable, thriving colony.