The Carpenter Ant
One of the largest ants marching in homes that are commonly found in the United States is the carpenter ant.
They are well known for invading and infesting homes and if they are not discovered early, they may cause expensive damage to the building structure.
Although there are many different species around, the two most commonly found in the country are the black carpenter ants and Florida carpenter ants.
What Carpenter Ants Eat
Carpenter ants can eat a wide source ranges of food, depending on the location and places where they nest. When indoors, they can feed on most sweets, meats, and other foods rich in sugar and protein.
And, when they are in an outdoors environment, they will eat living and dead insects. One important point to note is that although carpenter ant damage wood, they don’t eat wood.
Where Carpenter Ants Live
Carpenter ants prefer to build their nest in the moist wood environment. Indoors, they are likely to nest in decayed wood, bathroom tiles, tubs, walls, behind siding, in the attic, insulation, sink, attic beams, showers, and dishwashers or hollow spaces such as wall voids, curtain rods, and doors.
Outdoors, they will found rotting trees, tree roots, tree stumps and logs buried or lying on the ground as the best places.
Damage
There might be serious damage in the building structure if carpenter ants invade as they will tunnel through the wood and create galleries.
Prevention
Don’t wait for the carpenter ants to invade your home before you take action.
Prevention is always the best way. To effective prevent carpenter ants from invading your home, regular visual inspections is necessary and to enforce that, you will need to have a list of steps and plans. Check out some of these action plans:
1. Reduce or remove any possible ‘doorways’ for carpenter ants to enter your house. If any trees touch your house roofing or siding, trim it so that there is no direct contact between them.
2. Focus on all openings where pipes, wires or anything that connect and enter the house. Make sure that they are tightly sealed. Repair any plumbing or outdoor water taps leak as well as check out roof edges, attics, door, window frames.
3. Don’t delay the repairing of any cracks to the foundations as somehow, these insects are able to found it faster than we do.
4. If you need to bring the firewood into your home, examine them and make sure that they are carpenter ants risk-free. Never store firewood on the ground or stack against the sides of the home. Stack them up off the ground with non-organic material.
5. The nature of carpenter ants is that they are very attracted to moist, soft or rotting wood. So, regular checking of your house surroundings is necessary. Remove any moist, soft or rotting wood, log stumps, and waste wood will greatly help to minimize the risk factor.
