Carpenter Ant Control

Carpenter ants are especially a nuisance to any property, as they can be very destructive. Carpenter ants don’t eat wood like termites do, but they do build with it. You may see some wood shavings in different places in your home, like in the window sills or baseboards, or out on your deck. These are signs of carpenter ant activity.

Locating a Carpenter Ant Colony

Sometimes they are not easily detected because they are way more active at night than they are during the day. So if you work all day, you may miss the little activity during the day. Then while you’re sleeping, you may miss the activity at night.

Typically these ants have a home colony that may be located in an old tree, structure, sign, telephone pole, wood pile, or other wood source. The queens are in these home colonies, numbering up to about 10,000 ants. The worker ants go exploring your homes and decks, looking for harborage and food. They will bring any food they find back to the home colony. Carpenter ants bite, and they eat anything from plant juices, our food scraps or crumbs; they even eat other insects.

These worker ants may also build a satellite colony in your home or around your deck as another little nest in between travel. These colonies aren’t in the open and so they can go undetected for a long time, wreaking havoc on the structure of your home.

So what can I expect to happen with a carpenter ant service?

Once the technician comes out to your property and assess the situation. Once he identifies the carpenter ants he will treat your home starting with the foundation. Paffy’s uses a granular spray to bait the ants, spraying three feet up and three feet out from your foundation. The technician will also look for anything connected to your home like telephone wires, fences, garden hoses, things like that. Carpenter ants take the easiest trail to your house. If he finds things like this, he may spray it as well. Once the spray dries, the ants are attracted to the bait and take it back to their colony. When it gets to the colony, the queen eats it and dies. Without the queen, the colony cannot reproduce and the whole colony is destroyed. Paffy’s takes care of the problem at the root.

The spray will take between five and 10 days to take full effect. The product is safe for children and pets. Paffy’s only uses EPA and FDA approved, commercial-grade baits and sprays certified to exterminate the pests at the source.

Source: NPCA Field Guide to Structural Pests

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Carpenter ants are also targeted in our summer service as a part of our 3-Season Home Service Plan. If you want year-round coverage from insects and mice, give our office a call today! 651-459-4654. Otherwise our one-time treatment for carpenter ants will last about three months.