How to get rid of Carpenter Ants

Carpenter Ants are said to be one of the most organized and disciplined animals in the world. Almost everyone in their childhood has heard stories of how the organized ants make colonies and breed. How even when they travel, they do so in lines. Ants are always accepted as an organized and wonderful kind of insect and are also some of the most harmless. However, no matter how wonderful ants are accepted to be, they are still one of the most troublesome and common insects in the world. Ants are one of the oldest problem causing insects in the world, commonly infesting homes and getting into food. Ant infestations are one of the most damaging and downright annoying things to deal with. They breed and colonize in houses, around trees and even in the ground. Once a house has been infected by ants, they breed inside the ceilings, the walls or even in the floor and are not that easy to get rid of. Carpenter ants are destructive to your house, so when undertaking a home improvement project to fix the damage they cause, you first need to know how to get rid of carpenter ants.

One of the most damaging species of ant is the carpenter ant. What is a commonly known type of ants, still people don’t really have a lot of information about what a carpenter ant really is and things like where it lives and what it feeds on. Carpenter ants are basically a type of ants that basically breed in wood. They make burrows into wood and make nests while continuing to breed there. Unlike termites, the carpenter ants do not consume wood. Rather they prefer to build nests inside of the wood consisting of galleries chewed out with their mandibles in dead or damp wood. There are about a thousand species of carpenter ants in the world. The carpenter ant is one of the most damaging type of ants out there. Although termites cause the most damage as compared to carpenter ants, when the ants start colonizing and build their homes in the wood, they continue to keep inflicting damage on the wood throughout a long period of time. Once the carpenter ants affect something wooden, they keep on damaging it. For example, when wooden doors or walls or even furniture get affected by carpenter ants, they undergo a lot of damage and need to go through a series of interventions in order to get rid of the ants.

Learn more about Carpenter Ants

It is established that carpenter ants cause a lot of damage to wood and it is one of the worst kinds of infestations possible because if one thing wooden in the house gets infected, other pieces of furniture that are made of wood can easily follow that same path. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to get rid of carpenter ants as soon as possible. To get rid of them though, you need to determine that you indeed have carpenter ants. To find out whether or not a particular thing or place has been infected by carpenter ants, there are a few signs.

Signs that you have a carpenter ant infestation

• The first sign of there being a carpenter ant infestation is that you see ants. Whether they’re traveling up and down the stairs or you see them in the backyard. If you see ants in your house, there is a chance that your house may have a carpenter ant infestation although that does not necessarily have to be the case.
• Another sign of a carpenter ant infestation is wood shavings. If you find some wood shavings underneath wooden items of your house, there is a probability that you have a carpenter ant infestation.
• The third and most basic sign of a carpenter ant infestation is when you see winged ants emerge from walls or ceilings, you might have a carpenter ant infestation in this case.

Learn how to get rid of ants with non-toxic methods

How to get rid of carpenter ants?

Now that we know what signs to look for to determine if there is a carpenter ant infestation, the next step is to figure out how to get rid of that infestation. One of the most basic ways of getting rid of a carpenter ant infestation is to use the products that have specifically been designed for that purpose and are available in the market. These include insecticides and sprays in various forms. One basic thing used for getting rid of carpenter ant infestations is non-repelling insecticides and they are supposed to be sprayed on the perimeters of the infestation. Baits for the ants are available in most of the markets and are supposed to be used on the trails of the carpenter ants. Insecticide dusts are supposed to be used in galleries, voids and more open spaces while foams are supposed to be used in voids and galleries as well. Things like boric acid are very useful. Simply mix some boric acid and sugar and the ants will bring it back to their nest. This will slowly kill the population ultimately getting rid of your carpenter ant problem.