Carpenter Ants FAQ
If you are asking yourself, “how do I know if I have carpenter ants?”, look out for these warning signs of carpenter ants:
- Hearing a faint rustling sound or scratching noise in your walls or inside your woodwork. Carpenter ants burrow into the woodwork to create their nests, and they make noise when scraping out the wood particles.
- Spotting large black ants in your house.
- Finding piles of wood shavings or sawdust beneath wooden areas like baseboards, door jambs, and window sills.
- Seeing long ant trails or ant paths on your lawn. Carpenter ants will travel long distances to forage for food and bring it back to the nest.
- Finding large winged ants coming from your ceilings, walls, floor joists, crawl space, hollow doors, and other hidden cracks and crevices.
- Discovering ant droppings, which consist of soft, fibrous pieces of wood and fecal matter loosely compacted together.
- Seeing shed wings of “swarmer” ants near window sills, baseboards, or vents.
If you notice any of these signs, you may be hosting an active carpenter ant infestation and should be contacting a pest management professional immediately. These pests can cause extensive damage to wooden structures, which can eventually cause severe structural damage and costly repairs.
Carpenter ants can attack wood anywhere in your home. They prefer moist wood but will tunnel into dry wood and even styrofoam insulation in some situations. A carpenter ant problem that is ignored can lead to significant damage.
Carpenter ants typically nest outdoors in moist or decaying wood. They will also build nests in trees, tree stumps, tree roots, dead trees, and logs. Indoors, carpenter ants will often nest in areas that are damp or have excess moisture, such as around water leaks or in crawl spaces. These pests can also be found nesting in insulation, behind wallpaper, in wall voids, and beneath floorboards.
While carpenter ants generally nest outdoors, they will also build satellite nests in addition to their main nest. These satellite nests are smaller nests that are located some distance away from the main nest and are typically used to house the carpenter ant queen and her young.
