How To Kill Carpenter Ants
This article provides guidelines on how to kill carpenter ants, which destroy the wood parts of the home not to eat the wood but to create nests inside the material. These nests will also contain aphids that these ants raise and care for so that they are provided with a supply of honeydew. A previous method of control for carpenter ants was to kill the aphids that are eating the plants outside the home. However, spraying the plants with insecticide to kill the aphids was found to be an ineffective control method because the ants could search for aphids as far as several hundred yards from the home. Thus, it has become very important to know how to kill carpenter ants because this is the only effective way to control them.
Carpenter Ant Removal Guide
- Don't Spray Insecticide - An important guideline to follow on how to kill carpenter ants, particularly if you plan to conduct do it yourself pest control, is to avoid spraying insecticide directly on them. This is because this technique will only kill the worker ants but not the queens. Another reason why spraying on the ants is not a good idea is that insecticides are oftentimes repellent, which means that the ants will be repelled by the chemical and will avoid it. In fact, if the insecticide is sprayed close to the nest, the queens will order the worker ants to separate into several nests and new queens will be created. The result is that the problem has worsened because of the spraying of the insecticide. The problem with synthetic insecticides is that there are no available non-repellent chemicals in the market.
- Boric Acid Is A Good Option - So how should you go about with your home remedy pest control activities to eliminate the carpenter ants? Boric acid is a non-repellent insecticide that can be used effectively to kill carpenter ants. This is a common household chemical that is cheap but deadly to various insects including carpenter ants because it has the capability to damage their nervous systems. It is also safe to use even when there are children around. Boric acid is also effective in killing other types of ants and insects.
- Bait - Another important guideline on how to kill carpenter ants is to use ant bait. This is the direct opposite of repellent insecticides because the worker ants will come to the bait to pick it up and bring it to the colony. Naturally, boric acid is contained in these baits so that the carpenter ants inside the colony who eat the baits brought by the worker ants will also die. This would be effective for small colonies.
- Large Colonies - However, for large colonies that could be made up of tens of thousands of ants, it would take a long time before all of the ants would die. For this situation, the strategy is to drill holes in the wood where the nests are located and put the bait inside. It should be pointed out that if you discover a large colony in your home, it is likely that there has been extensive damage to the wooden structures and some of them may need to be replaced.
