Carpenter ants are not as prominent as pests like termites, but they can damage your home the same as termites. They invade homes foraging for food and are a nuisance wherever they go. They burrow through wood creating tunnels and nests, and this type of damage can be found in damp, decaying, and hollow wood and may extend to hard and dry wood where they nest. These ants do not eat wood like termites; they chew wood and spit it out. The best way to eliminate these ant species is by contacting a pest control service because you cannot exterminate them permanently with over-the-counter pesticides. However, there are things you may not know about carpenter ants, which we have mentioned below:
Thing #1: The Strength
Carpenter ants are robust when it comes to lifting things. They can lift things to seven times their weight using their teeth. If we were these ant species, who knows, we could move a car with our teeth.
Thing #2: The Tidiness
They are tidy ant species as they remove old food and dead ants from their nests. They clean up the debris standing in their ways, leaving the piles of wood shavings alongside dead ant parts on the ground. During work, they collect the resin to disinfect their nests.
Thing #3: The Bite
These ants species do not have stingers but strong jaws. More often than not, they use their jaws to chew through the wood. If they bite you, they also inject the wound with formic acid to burn your skin. However, carpenter ants rarely bite, and their bites can hurt you mildly.
Thing #4: The Colony
Carpenter ants can establish colonies with thousands of wingless worker ants who find food for the colony. Generally, they have one wingless queen that lays eggs. Once they establish a colony, winged males and female swarmers appear and start mating, forming new colonies. A queen can survive for 25 years laying thousands of fertilized eggs during that period. Hence, you should call ant control experts to get rid of these ants if you do not want them to keep damaging your property without permission.
Thing #5: The Intrusion
Carpenter ants enter a house by chewing through exterior wood around windows, decks, roof eaves, or porches. Then, they nibble their way inside and start causing damage to your property that can be enormous if you do not do something about these ants.
Thing #5: The Food
Carpenter ants may be considered wood destroyers like termites, but wood is not their actual food target. These ants feed on dead and alive insets alongside honey, syrup, jelly, meat, grease, and fat. If you do not keep your pet’s food away from the ground, carpenter ants can forage for it 100 metres from their nests.
Thing #6: The Season
These ants hibernate in their nests during the winter. But if there is a colony of these ants indoors close to a heat source, they get the desired heat to stay active rather than dormant. Therefore, seeing carpenter ants in the winter in your home means they have infested your residential space.
Conclusion
Carpenter ants infest homes foraging for food and build their nests burrowing through the wood. These ants can cause severe damage to your property; therefore, you need to get rid of them for good by utilizing a pest control service. Here is what you need to know about carpenter ants:
- These ants have strong teeth.
- They ensure their nest remains disinfected by cleaning the debris from it.
- Their bite causes one’s skin to burn.
- They establish their colonies with the help of worker ants and a queen ant.
- They infest homes using exterior wood around windows, decks, roof eaves, or porches.
- They are dormant in the winter, but their colonies remain active due to the heat source’s presence in homes.