While some pests are more of a nuisance than others, none of them are good when they’re inside your home. Bees sting, rats are vile, and the horrors of a bedbug infestation don’t need to be described to be felt and understood.

You may not think of ants as being particularly dirty or harmful, but they can chew on wood and damage structures. Because they can reach every nook and cranny, they’re also a risk of food contamination.

Here’s your guide to different ant extermination methods provided used by the best Toronto exterminators, explaining how GreenLeaf Pest Control can keep your home free of this dirty, invasive pest.

How to Recognize a Carpenter Ant Infestation

Identifying a carpenter ant infestation is essential if you’re going to get rid of them, so let’s cover that before describing extermination methods. The surest sign of a carpenter ant infestation involves seeing workers or swarmers. If you see mature ants taking flight in late spring, these are swarmers, and it means you have a problem on your hands.

Short of seeing the ants themselves, finding holes or small openings on the surface of wood is also evidence of an infestation. You may notice a mix of sawdust-like shavings, insulation fragments, and insect body parts.

Any accumulation of this sort of debris points to a carpenter ant infestation requiring ant pest control services. They’re also drawn towards wood softened by fungus, meaning you should look out for damp, rotting wood around the home.

As for the ants themselves, they’re a large species that comes in different colours: black, red, yellow, tan, brown, or any combination of these colours. The evenly-rounded head is connected to its arch-shaped thorax by a single node.

They can get as large as half an inch long, though size varies according to subspecies. If you have any questions about the ants in or around your home, don’t hesitate to give us a call.

Eliminate Attractants

Removing what carpenter ants need to survive, water, prevents them from entering your home. Get rid of any standing water or sources of moisture that surround your home.

Pare tree branches back from your home, as sometimes pests crawl along them to get inside. Seal up any cracks or tiny openings around the bottoms of doors and windows using a silicone-based caulk. Carpenter ants tend to nestle in stacks of wood, so keep firewood or any building materials away from your home.

Along the same lines, you want to ensure your food is sealed and stored properly. Food attracts carpenter ants, and this measure goes towards keeping them outside. Once they breach the walls and get inside, though, that’s another story.

No DIY Ant Removal

You need professional carpenter ant extermination if you find them in your home. You won’t be able to eliminate them all yourself, and their numbers may increase after you begin treatment, especially if they have already started to build and expand their nest.

GreenLeaf Pest Control specializes in long-term solutions to eliminate seasonal carpenter ants and any other ant or pest infesting your home. Our residential and commercial treatments are always environmentally friendly, never putting the planet’s health at risk.

Our treatments are also designed to be harsh enough on pests while friendly to pets. You want the infestation eliminated without posing any risk to your furry little ones!

Your local GreenLeaf Pest Control technician offers friendly services that are always respectful of your home. Don’t hesitate to call us to eliminate carpenter ants or any different ant types infesting where you live.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Our specialists know how to recognize the phases of infestation and treat each one accordingly. Reading the signs of how deeply entrenched the carpenter ant infestation is required to uproot them all for food.

Proactive Home Protection Plan

The list of what homeowners need to know about carpenter ants is long, but it shrinks if they entrust the GreenLeaf Pest Control home protection plan. We’ll prevent a carpenter ant infestation from ever occurring rather than eliminate it appears.

Our year-round program gives inclusive protection against common pests, so you can sit back and enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing your home will always be pest-free. The custom, best-in-class service provides a total solution that results in you doing the least work possible.

Here are the Home Protection Plan’s four phases:

1. Intensive initial service for any existing pests and to assess current conditions
2. Follow-up exterior inspection and preventative treatment during specified months
3. Special bonus service in case pests are still found, free of charge
4. Exterior traps to combat any population that still remains

No two homes are the same, so anti-pest treatments should be correspondingly different, too. What remains constant is our expertise, dedication to quality services, and our commitment to being friendly and respectful whenever we’re in your home.

Our Home Protection Plan encompasses pests like spiders, cockroaches, mice, crawling insects, stinging insects, and both carpenter and pavement ants. Whatever kind of pests you have on the scene, or want to prevent from ever appearing, call GreenLeaf Pest Control to keep you clean, safe, and healthy.

Pharaoh Ants

Carpenter ants aren’t the only problematic ants you may find in your home. Pharaoh ants number in the thousands, and if they’re disturbed, the colony’s members migrate to establish several new ones in a process known as “budding.”

Pharoah ants eat sweets, oils, proteins, and other dead insects. A bit like carpenter ants, pharaoh ants often hide under debris in shady areas. However, they’re bigger threats to spreading disease pathogens such as salmonella and Streptococcus pyogenes.

People want to feel comfortable, clean, and safe inside their homes, and seeing pests can considerably undermine these feelings. From their general ickiness to the very real health problems ants pose, don’t take killing them into your own hands. There could be thousands of ants, so if you want them thoroughly eliminated in a way that’s healthy for your home and friendly to the environment, call GreenLeaf Pest Control today.