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Carpenter Ants | Little Black Ants | Moisture Ants | Sugar Ants
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Carpenter Ants
What is a Carpenter Ant?
Carpenter ant workers are about 1/4 – 1/2 inches long, dull black with reddish legs and golden hairs covering the abdomen. Queens are about 5/8+ inches long. Other color combinations of carpenter ants can be of red and black, or completely red or brown. Although carpenter ants do not sting, their bites can be quite painful, especially when they inject formic acid into the wound. The antenna is segmented, without a club, and the thorax lacks a spine. Ants are generally active along ant trails from April to mid-October. These trails follow natural contours and lines of least resistance and also frequently cut across lawns. Traffic on these trails may be noticeable during the day, but peak traffic occurs after sunset and continues throughout the night.
External indication of infestation from carpenter ants is usually indicated when there are is a presence of small openings on the surface of the wood. Here the workers will expel debris which consists of sawdust-like shavings and fragments of insulation and insect body parts. They prefer to a hollow out soften wood that is associated with moisture problems and fungus.
Why Should I Care?
Carpenter ants are more than a nuisance…they “mine” wood to create tunnels and chambers for living space. Although carpenter ants do not actually eat wood, this mining activity damages wood structures and can lead to tricky situations.
Carpenter ants’ prime food source is plant pests, especially aphids, scale, mealy bugs, and others that produce honey dew. Inspect your plants. Trim back shrubs and trees that touch your structure.
What Should I Do?
A&A Pest Control has multiple professional treatment strategies to eliminate a carpenter ant infestation. After inspecting the structure and surrounding landscape, your specialist will work with you to determine the best approach for your situation. If you’ve found ants on your home or property, contact A&A Pest Control for the best solution.
Little Black Ants
One of the most common ants in homes, the Little Black Ant is active day and night and is often seen carrying particles of food many feet back to its nest. Their colonies are large – with thousands of workers and several queens.
Little Black Ants eat a wide variety of foods including sweets, meats and other insects – living or dead. Their preferred food is honeydew – the sweet secretion of plants. In the house they tend toward sweets, meats, bread, grease, oils and fruit. When they find a food source, they release a pheromone that calls worker ants to help cut up and cart the food particles back to the nest. The workers are known raise their abdomens and spray venom when threatened or alarmed.
Outdoors, Little Black Ants nest in open areas of soil in lawns creating very small craters of very fine soil. They also nest under dead and decaying wood – logs, tree stumps, dead tree limbs, tree bark, firewood and hollow tree cavities; beneath leaf litter, rocks, and bricks; and in old termite galleries. Indoors they nest in wall voids, woodwork, masonry, and under carpeting.
Painful bites can cause swelling and inflammation. When disturbed they raise their abdomens and spray venom at any rival ants. For such a small creature they can even invade fire ant colonies and take over. They have also been known to damage electric cables, clothes and fabrics.
Our pest control experts at A&A are like super sleuths who can find how the ants are entering your home, uncover some of their unusual nesting sites and create barriers. We have access to special ant control baits and repellants that help provide a long-term solution to stop current and prevent future infestations. Plus, our control methods are safe for your family members and pets.
Moisture Ants
Moisture Ants are wood destroying ants that are also potentially destructive. They like to nest behind bathtub walls, within crawlspaces, under slabs, in and around windows and exposed wood roofs. Moisture Ants seek out areas where moist rotting wood is present. Their nests, called cartons, are brown and filled with holes which fill the voids within the space in which they nest. Often confused with carpenter ants, these ants are smaller at about 1/8″, are lighter in color, and have telltale bumpy backs with a larger dip between the abdomen and thorax.
Odorous House Ants (Sugar Ants)
Odorous House Ants – commonly referred to as “Sugar Ants” – are tiny, 1/16th – 1/8th inch long and blackish-brown. Odorous House Ants get their name from the stench they produce when squished. Many people report smelling a rotten coconut or a rancid butter smell. Odorous House Ants feed on dead insects and sugary substances and tend to be seen in kitchens, bathrooms, and cupboards or anywhere food crumbs or food residue may be found. They commonly nest in or around houses, many times in the wall voids, making their nests difficult to find.
If you are seeing Odorous House Ants in your home, they most likely have at least one nest in or around the home. The length of time you’ve had the problem will determine how many nests there could actually be. An important thing to know about these pesky little ants, is that they are “budding ants” which means that they will decide to split up the nest whenever they feel like it and start a new colony in another location. The typical time frame for nest to stay in one location is 22 days. Typically, a home that has been infested by Odorous House Ants once will be re-infested by them again and again, unless their food, water, and shelter sources are removed.
A&A will use Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for Odorous House Ants, meaning the service specialist will be providing a thorough inspection as well as seasonal inspection around the home or business to make sure the ants don’t come back. The specialist will also use preventative methods whenever possible to seal up cracks and crevices where the ants are getting in. He or she will also treat at the source of each nest to target the queen.
It is normal after the first treatment of Odorous House Ants to see an influx of activity. You may think your problem is getting worse but it is actually getting much better. A follow up or two is almost always required to get the ants under control and manageable for the seasons to come.
Pharaoh Ants
Workers are monomorphic and are about 1/16 inches long. The body is usually pale yellowish to reddish with the abdomen often darker to blackish and unevenly rounded. They do have a stinger. Queens are about 1/8 inches long with or without wings and slightly darker in color than the workers.Pharaoh workers are about 1.5 to 2 millimeters long, a little more than 1/16-inch. They are light yellow to reddish brown in color with a darker abdomen.Pharaoh ant workers have a non-functional stinger used to generate pheromones. The petiole (narrow waist between the thorax and abdomen) has two nodes and the thorax has no spines.
Pharaoh ant eyesight is poor. The antennal segments end in a distinct club with three progressively longer segments. Males are about 3mm long, black, winged (but do not fly). Queens are dark red and 3.6–5mm long. They initially have wings that are lost soon after mating, but do not fly.