How to Spot a Carpenter Ant Infestation

Carpenter ants are a pest that you don’t want in your home. While they don’t eat wood to survive, they do chew through it to create tunnels, and they can cause an awful lot of damage when you get a bunch of them around your home in large numbers. Many times, you won’t even notice that they are there unless you get lucky enough to spot one of the little guys, or you happen to notice frass (sawdust looking wood bits) at the entrance of one of their tunnels.

Learn to Identify Them

The main way that you’ll figure out you have a carpenter ant infestation is by knowing what the little buggers look like. Take a look at a few pictures of carpenter ants, and try to keep the image in mind the next time that you see an ant around your home. You can always trap any ants that you find as well, and then take the time to look them up to be sure that you don’t have carpenter ants.

Look for Frass

One way to spot carpenter ants is to search around for frass around your home. This is little spots of sawdust created by carpenter ants burrowing into the wood of your home. You’ll often find this in basements and low entry points into your home. It will be piled up along walls and in other spots that you might not expect it. Just keep your eyes open for this, because it could be the tool you use to pinpoint an infestation.

Look for Alates

When you spot flying ants in the windows of your home, you have a very serious infestation on your hands. These are known as alates, and they are only around when a mature colony is present. They are responsible for setting up additional colonies, and if you don’t act quickly you could end up with multiple many thousand ant colonies inside your home.

Get Professional Help

The moment that you notice you have a carpenter ant colony, it’s time to call in the pros. That’s because, in most instances you won’t know about them until after the colony is greater than 2,000 ants. At that point you have a lot of damage occurring to your home, and you have an issue that really needs to be resolved. A pro will know how to locate these ants, and then get rid of them from your home so that more damage doesn’t continue over time.