Household pests are generally a minor nuisance, but carpenter ants present a significant threat to your home. The damage they can do in a short time is both devastating to your home’s internal structure and costly to repair.
How do such tiny insects cause so much harm? Let’s take a look at a few of the primary ways a carpenter ant infestation can inflict serious damage on your home.
Nesting
At this phase, carpenter ants do not cause a significant amount of damage. Generally, you will not see any ants except for a scout or two looking for food. A house is not actually a primary food source for carpenter ants, but they tend to send out scouts to find access points where food is readily available. Damage to a home’s structure is typically negligible at this point, as the ants have only begun to bore shallow nests into unexposed wood.
Tunneling
When the ants begin to dig kick out tunnels to expand their access inside your home, they start causing more damage to wooden beams and structures. Small piles of sawdust also start to appear piled up around tunnels.
Unlike termites, carpenter ants do not eat the wood fiber they chew up as they tunnel along, they just push it out of the way. The damage to the internal structure of the home is beginning to mount at this point, but it is still treatable and most likely unnoticeable.
Maturity
The nest has reached full maturity when winged ants start appearing on the inside and outside of window panes. These ants, called swarmers, exist to reproduce and start new nests. It may be tempting to swat these ants out of the air or vacuum them up, but the proper response is to eliminate the mature nest at its source.
Structural Damage
Should a nest go untreated long enough to reach maturity, they will eventually tunnel so extensively through th]
e structure of your home that supports will begin to weaken and warm. Stuck doors, sloping floors, stuck windows, bowing ceilings and bulging walls are all symptoms of severe structural damage that is extremely expensive to repair. If a nest has reached this level of maturity, it is time to call an exterminator to eliminate the nest and fumigate the house.
Get Rid of Ant Infestations
Have you seen carpenter ants around your New Jersey home? Do not wait for the invisible damage to take hold. Call Abarb Pest Service today to schedule a free consultation. Let us deal with the infestation before it costs you a fortune in repairs.
