08/02/2015
Carpenter ant infestations frequently show up in the suburbs north of Dallas and very likely elsewhere in the area. This is an important situation.
Carpenter ants are a wood destroying insect, though the damage they cause is typically less than termite colonies. They do not eat wood in the home, but they do chew and excavate wood and other softer building materials, and they can enter in large numbers. The wood in the home that they affect, typically has excess moisture content.
Ants, like all insects, have three body parts: a head at the front where antennae are attached, a thorax in the middle where all the legs and wings are attached and an abdomen at the back.
They are the largest ant that we deal with in the Dallas area, and most of these ants have dark abdomens and reddish color thorax. But many can be solid black. There can be some rather small members of a colony, but the majority, especially the winged reproductives, are large, getting to be as long as a half an inch. Sometimes even slightly longer.
They produce frass, which are the small pieces of wood or other small excavated building materials or wood from adjacent trees or shrubs that are kicked out of their nests. They frequently look for crevices in tree bark. In your home, they seek out areas of excess moisture. Because of this, it's important to keep your dirt level around a foundation lower than the top of the slab, and keep your landscape pruned off and away from the house.
These ants can be a challenge to eliminate. Spraying only the visible workers will not solve the problem if colonies are established in the home. Typically, the best way to treat for other ants nesting in a home is to use bait on the colonies. But bait alone will not eliminate a Carpenter Ant colony, and often you'll get no bait acceptance at all. And using some traditional sprays will be repellent. The ants will avoid the treatment and find an alternative entry into the home.
The three most important factors in eliminating carpenter ant home infestations involve both management and treatment.
First, issues causing extra moisture in your home need to be dealt with. Landscape growing thickly on the building can make control almost impossible. It increases the likelihood of moisture where the wood frame sits on top of the slab in the home. Especially under low to the ground windows, such as a bay window will accumulated moisture make an attractive nesting place. Secondly, landscape touching the building gives the ants alternative accesses to enter the house, avoiding sprays applied to the base of the foundation and in weep holes.
You also need to have good ventilation in your weep holes. It's not unusual in these days when people desire to eliminate insect pests without insecticide to stuff weep holes with something like steel wool. But this is often counterproductive in controlling ants that love moisture, such as Acrobat Ants, Carpenter Ants or Odorous House Ants. Weep holes are the places between bricks on the bottom row of bricks on your house, where periodically, the mortar is left out. In some houses, this is every six or seven bricks. Some, it's every three to five. Some builders have no mortar between any brick on the row immediately above the foundation.
While using something like a screen mesh cut to fit in the weep holes allows the moisture to leave as designed, while keeping some larger pests like invading cockroaches out, filling the weep hole with steel wool also keeps perimeter sprays from penetrating behind the bricks to deal with ants trailing in the space between the bricks and the silver insulation board. So filling your weep holes will often increase your vulnerability to ants.
In my opinion, a carpenter ant infestation is best controlled with a perimeter treatment of the house with Termidor. This is a spray initially developed as a termiticide, but is the best ant spray I've used in 36 years in the pest control business. It kills the insects slowly, which gives ants trailing into the house the opportunity to interact with other colony members, so you don't just kill the workers that came into contact with the treated area. And it is non-repellent.
But Termidor can only be applied on the bottom one foot on the building perimeter and one foot of soil immediately around the perimeter. So for good results, it is extremely important to get all landscape pruned to not touch the home, and to keep it off. And Termidor can only be applied by a pest control company.
The good news is that such pruning effort will also be quite valuable in general pest control for both insects and rodent pests, by removing the attraction for harborage immediately around the building. This same strategy works well for the tougher to control Acrobat Ants.
So just like any other ant control, the key factors are
A. Keep all landscape pruned off the building.
B. Make sure dirt is lower than the top of the foundation on the entire perimeter of the house. Ants might infest the house 30 feet away from where they workers are trailing into the house. Or more.
C. Get moisture problems, like a leaking outdoor water faucet fixed or drainage problems corrected.
D. Make sure you have proper ventilation around the foundation.
E. Apply an insecticide on the perimeter that is not repellent to ants.
and one other possible factor. Moisture loving ants love to trail on your soaker hose outside. So it might be a good idea, if acrobat ants are a problem to take up your soaker hose on a temporary basis.
It is very common in January or February for Carpenter Ants that have infested your home, but not been visible to you, to suddenly show up on warm days, between the typically cold ones. Often it will be as a swarm, with the largest ants we have showing up, primarily with wings.
If you suspect you have a carpenter ant or any other ant problem anywhere in north Dallas or the northern suburbs, I'd love to help you with your treatment.
RANDY DUNCAN
DUNCAN SERVICES
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RandyTheBugman.com
