There are over 1,000 species of carpenter ants. The majority of them are large, between a quarter of an inch and an inch long, and black, although there are red ones as well. There are even a few sorts in South East Asia which will explode if threatened, squirting a sticky substance out through their heads which immobilizes the attackers. The exploding carpenter ant dies.
Carpenter ants are thought to do a lot of damage to timber, as they gnaw their way up the middle through its length. However, this is a popular myth, unlike termites, carpenters do not eat wood, they gnaw their way through it to get somewhere. They spit the gnawed wood out. This is called frass, and it can often be seen in heaps like sawdust. It is a good indication that carpenters are busy in or around your home.
Carpenter ants like to travel through the length of damp or decayed dead timber in much the same way as termites do although they do not consume the timber. Carpenters feed on dead insects, dead animals and honeydew from aphids and scale insects outside the home, but if they come inside your home they will be searching for dropped or uncovered food, especially anything sweet and sugary. Therefore, cleanliness is an important factor of clearing carpenters out of your house.
These ants will walk as fae as a hundred yards while foraging, but they like to be near a recurring source of food. A feature of carpenter ant colonies is that they may build satellite nests away from their main colony. This is often why they enter a home.
If they regularly find spilled food in the kitchen, they may make a nest in the wall to take advantage of it, particularly if the window or door frame is a bit decayed. Inside the home, they will probably nest in a cavity wall, outside the home they prefer to construct nests in decaying tree stumps.
It is no good spraying carpenter ants with pesticide if you want to get rid of them - especially if you kill large numbers of them. This may sound odd, but the reason is that the nest will miss these workers and so the queen will bump up her production of eggs to compensate it. If she over compensates, you are in a worse situation that you were before spraying.
The only way to wipe out a nest of carpenter ants is to destroy the queen and the entire colony with poison. This is not tricky although it does take a bit of exploratory work. Carpenters are most active between dusk and midnight, so put out honey on glass or sticky tape where they are active and follow them when they take it home.
Do not forget, they may have several nests in their colony. If you have to have light, wrap red cellophane over a normal torch, because ants can not see red light. When you have found their nests, put poison down outside each nest as indicated on the label. Do this for several days in a row until you do not see anymore carpenter ants. If you are still getting them, you have missed a nest.
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