carpenter ant control

The most obvious signal that you have carpenter ants, is seeing them, but it's not always a reliable sign that you have nests of carpenter ants in your house. Since the damage to your house is caused in tunneling to build nests, your biggest concern is whether or not there is a nest in the house. Carpenter ants nest both inside and outside a house, and they'll travel as much as 100 yards from their nest in their search for food.


Before you can eliminate a nest of carpenter ants, you have to find it. The easiest way to find the nest is to follow an ant home. One way to make it easier to follow the ants home is to give them food. They're particularly fond of tuna packed in water. Set out little flakes of tuna, and then watch for ants. The tuna will actually make it easier for you to follow the ant back to its nest.


Prevention is always better than trying to cure a problem that has set in. The best ways to keep carpenter ants from setting up shop in your house are:
• Eliminate high moisture conditions that attract them.
• Replace moisture-damaged and rotted wood before ants are attracted to it.-If you store wood or lumber near the house or in a garage, be sure that you keep it dry.
• Stack firewood away from the house outside to prevent ants from migrating from the woodpile to the house.-Remove tree stumps and roots.
• Remove tree stumps and roots.-Keep trees and bushes near the house pruned and trimmed to eliminate ‘highways' that invite carpenter ants into your home.

Repellents aren't the best way of dealing with this problem. Repellents can help repel a colony that is moving towards your home, but once inside with a full infestation, they won't work as well. What you really need to look into using are the baits. Baits can eliminate the colony versus just move them to another area of your property or home The baits that you need to get are the ones with much larger granules because these ants are much larger than other insect pests. The idea is that they are covered in a food source with poison inside. Since carpenter ants are a colony based pest, they will bring the poison back to the rest. The end goal with baits is for this food to find it's way back to the queen to kill off the colony completely. This means that baits are effective but can take time since the queen could be far away from the walls of your home. For best results, don't use baits and sprays together. Sprays will kill them before the baits can get back to the colony making the effort pointless. Pick one strategy