Ants love the summer. They become slow and stunted in the cold due to the liquid structure of their bodies and get sluggish and enter hibernation. This can be a real problem for people with houses made out of primarily wood and anyone who has rotting wood on their property. These ants don’t like the sun and need a place that is cool and damp to do their work. This means they need wet and preferably rotting wood. Anything else is just not good enough. It is best to contact professional ant exterminator Guelph in the Greater Toronto Area to declare your home ant-free as soon as possible!
The infestation rarely starts in your home unless you already have a leak and rotting wood in your house. It usually begins outside in some wood that is on your property. It could be the mulch in your garden or the old wonky shed in the corner of the yard or it could be the firewood you have piled high by the fence. Any of these things could house a carpenter ant colony. Even the stumps of trees are in danger. Once they infest something on your property they biggin to grow their colony, reproducing, foraging, and building their nests and tunnels.
Eventually that colony will reach maturity and produce winged ants. These ants are roughly half male and half female. They perform a mating dance in the air to produce offspring. This is not a great situation as they are sitting ducks to predators like birds that just love, love ,love some of that juicy ant behind. But they have a plan. They know where they can safely build their nest, they go to your house. The big wooden block on the property they have infested. They enter often through a window and do their dance. When it is completed the male ants die and litter the floor, the female ants also rip off their wings and consume the muscle that made them work. She is now pregnant and a queen of what will soon be her own colony. She has to find a crack or void in the wall that is safe and seal herself in to lay her eggs. This is how a new colony can start and how your house can get infested but carpenter ants when there aren’t even any on your property.
If you have carpenter ants then you will want to get rid of them. Spraying boric acid around the house and silica dust in a solution of something mildly sticky will make short work of the ant’s carapace and cedar oil, which has a potent smell that can actually suffocate them. But if the infestation is too big and you need help then you can call Ant Control, our technicians will help you rid your home of ants forever!
