Carpenter Ants Cedar Siding

How to know you have carpenter ants stage one.

Carpenter ants cedar siding.

Carpenter ants often favor insulation and inner walls but will make their way outward to siding as their colony expands. They chew on the inside of your wood. Boring ants will move up into siding because it provides an excellent location for them to build a nest as our on line boring ant article explains. Carpenter ants rely on pheromone trails to find food sources and to travel.

If you have wood siding and you spot small openings on the wood s surface you may have carpenter ant infestation. Carpenter ants vary in size and can have different looks to them. Carpenter ants damage wood by hollowing it out for nesting. While black carpenter ants are common these pests may be a combination of black and red or completely black red or brown.

Carpenter ants don t chew on the outside of your wood where you can see them and stop them. If you have a serious carpenter ant problem you may find wood shavings underneath your siding. Through the holes ants expel debris which looks like sawdust shavings. You can use essential oils like tea tree lemon orange or cedarwood on a cotton ball to wipe down surfaces to interrupt these trails.

If your patio or siding stays wet this can attract carpenter ants. The best product for treating boring ants in wood siding is the drione dust. Carpenter ants readily bore into cedar trees and nest. They typically prefer moist rotting wood so their presence can indicate a problem with decaying walls too.

Use a hand duster to apply it and you ll get a quick kill because the dust penetrates like no liquid can. Signs of an infestation. By cleaning surfaces where ants have traveled you ve destroyed this treasure map to your home. Here s what every homeowner should know about carpenter ants.

They burrow into it to make their nests so they leave behind a wood dust. Carpenter ants actively burrow in the wood but don t feed on it as far as i know termites are the only common pests that actually eat the wood. The aromatic quality of cedar wood may be effective at repelling cloth eating moths but other insects infest cedar unaffected by the scent. This video shows boring ants in siding being treated so you can understand why drione is ideal for ant problems located in the siding of a home.

Instead carpenter ant nests have a smooth sandpapered. Black and red completely black red or brown. The regular black ants don t burrow into the wood. Unlike termites carpenter ants do not actually eat wood.

And if you don t know what warning signs to look for they can do this for years.