Can You Hear The Ants In Your Walls?

Carpenter ants are definitely a pest to take seriously. They can cause enormous and expensive damage to your home and property.

While termites tend to be a bit more destructive, though only a little, carpenter ants can cause plenty of damage on their own. In fact, in the United States each year, homeowners suffer hundreds of millions of dollars of damage from these small, innocent looking destroyers.

What Do Carpenter Ants Look Like?

How Are Carpenter Ants So Destructive?

How Do I Protect My Home From Carpenter Ants?

---

What Do Carpenter Ants Look Like?

Carpenter ants have the typical "ant" body - they are segmented and are a long oval shape. Unlike many other ants, carpenter ants have three segments and a round thorax when viewed from the side. They have six legs and two antennae that are jointed partway up. Carpenter ants are bigger than most species, generally getting to be about a quarter- to a half-inch in length. The queens can be as long as a full inch.

Carpenter ants are usually black, but they can be found in combinations of black, red, and brown. Some of the ants, although not the workers, have wings and can fly. They will swarm around their ant colonies.

It's easy to confuse other ants with carpenter ants. Not all the big black ants you see are going to burrow through your home's structure, but take it seriously if you see ants like these around your property.

How Are Carpenter Ants So Destructive?

Fortunately, though they have strong enough bites to cause pain, carpenter ants don't generally bother people or pets. They confine most of their damage to your wooden structures - sheds, decks, fences, wood piles, and - most importantly - your home.

Carpenter ants, unlike termites, do not eat wood. They do, however, create tunnels in wooden structures in which to build their nests. They will chew the wood to create nesting sites, causing damage throughout the wooden structures, weakening or even destroying key support pieces for your home, deck, porch or other property. Interestingly, damage from carpenter ants and termites is different because termites will only damage wood with the grain, while carpenter ants will go both with and across the grain of the wood. Additionally, the tunnels of carpenter ants are smooth and clean, while termites usually line their tunnels with mud or other debris.

Carpenter ants will damage wood both inside and outside dwellings. They are attracted to wood that is moisture-damaged and therefore easier to chew, so they like to live inside the walls under window sills or door frames, crawl spaces, attics, inside wooden portions of porches and support beams, even inside dishwasher or bathtub support frames. They will also live in hollow trees or trees with knotholes.

How Do I Protect My Home From Carpenter Ants?

First, as carpenter ants are most attracted to moisture-damaged wood, make sure that you're doing all you can to keep the moisture away from your house. Make sure there are no leaks in sinks, appliances, showers, and bathtubs. Keep all seals in good repair, like those around skylights, vents, windows, doors, and pipes. Ensuring that rain gutters are unclogged and drain spouts are flowing water away from your house will also reduce possible water damage to your home, thereby discouraging carpenter ants to move in.

In your yard, remove rotting wood. Trim your tree limbs away from your roof or near your house, as the ants can enter the structure by creating a trail from the tree into your home where the two touch.

If you find a nest, or suspect there is one, try to locate the trail to and from the nesting site. Carpenter ants use a permanent trail, so you should be able to trace it - if you can find the trail, that is. Kill, vacuum, spray, or otherwise remove any carpenter ants you find.

Carpenter ants can be very hard to detect until the problem is significant. They can be easily overlooked, as they live inside the wood and the walls. If you are noticing piles of sawdust around, or hearing small rustling sounds inside the walls (yes, you can actually sometimes hear them!), you should take action to locate and eliminate the ants before they cause expensive or irreparable damage to your home and structures.

Because carpenter ants can be particularly difficult to eradicate, and their nests often tough to find, the best thing to do is hire a pest professional who will spray the necessary insecticide to control the ant population. Baits can also be used to help control ant populations, especially effective in circumstances where the nest cannot be located or sprayed directly. Keeping a year-round professional pest control barrier for your home will be key in preventing an infestation from forming in the first place.

Call us today and let us help give you the peace of mind that your home is safe from carpenter ants - and other destructive or dangerous pests. We'd love to hear from you!

To learn even more about local Virginia pests, check out our pest library