When there’s a threat to a homeowner’s property, they need to know what it looks like. Ants may be tiny, but they wield a lot of collective power when they roam in groups of tens of thousands.

The carpenter ant does not get their name from their tendency to enter people’s homes and build shelves or tables. Instead, they tend to nest deep in wooden structures, chewing or gnawing on the material in ways that don’t exactly bolster your home’s foundations. They don’t eat the wood, like termites, but they leave spent material akin to sawdust outside their nest.

If you don’t want the sound of this happening in your home, it helps to learn how to recognize carpenter ants from their peers. Please read on for more tips about what carpenter ants look like and how GreenLeaf Pest Control can keep your home ant free.

Stats About Their Physiques

A few basic stats will give you a picture of what carpenter ants look like. They have six legs and are usually red, black, or some combination of both.

Carpenter ants tend to be about half to five-eighths of an inch in size, and their body is segmented and ovular in shape. If you see an ant with antennas, it could very well be a carpenter ant.

Carpenter ants are Canadian ants in that they’re found across the country.

How to Spot Their Presence

The odds are good that you’ll recognize the sign of a carpenter ant’s presence before you notice the tiny workers or swarmers themselves. As mentioned, carpenter ants get their name because they create holes through the wood in your home. If you see a tiny opening on the surface of the wood, this could be them.

Carpenter ants bring sawdust-like shavings through the holes outside their nests. They also carry with them bits of insulation and even insect body parts. If you see traces of these things near the mouth of the opening, they’re signs of an active carpenter ant infestation.

Carpenter ants create gallery walls that are smooth, but they have a sand-papered appearance. These active galleries have no debris. To make their lives easier, carpenter ants prefer to gnaw on wood made soft by fungus and moisture problems.

That’s why soft, rotting wood can attract carpenter ants in the first place. Call Greenleaf for Toronto pest control services that will eliminate any carpenter ant infestation you currently have or prevent one from occurring.

What Sustains Carpenter Ants

Like all creatures, carpenter ants need a source of water to survive. Eliminating sources of standing water or other moisture is an excellent way to prevent carpenter ants from entering your home.

They can go to surprising lengths to find a water source. Sometimes ants can climb up nearby trees and enter your home from the branches, so cutting these back away from the house is another worthwhile preventative measure. Seal up any little cracks or gaps in your home’s façade with silicone caulk, especially around the bottoms of doors and windows.

Keep building materials and bundles of firewood away from your home. Whether the carpenter ants are drawn to the wood and then find water nearby, or vice versa, is a distinction without a difference.

Collective Tendencies

Groups of carpenter ants tend to build nests outdoors in whatever wood sources they can find, from stumps, rotting fence posts, bundles of firewood, or even under stones near sticks. The parent colony, located outside, is the main colony containing the queen, eggs, and their young.

From there, satellite nests can branch out, containing the workers, mature larvae, and pupae. These satellite branches usually form in the middle of summer, whether indoors or outdoors. However, they only set out after the parent colony has matured for years.

You may have your hands full wondering how to control ants in the house, but you can nip this problem in the bud by knowing their tendencies outdoors.

How GreenLeaf Protects You

GreenLeaf Pest Control is the professional ant exterminator in Toronto and the GTA that eradicates existing infestations or proactively prevents ones from occurring. If you already have carpenter ants in your home, we’ll go straight to its heart and use custom treatments that aren’t available on store shelves to eradicate their population.

GreenLeaf Pest Control also proudly offers our home protection plan services to ensure carpenter ants, nor any other pest never enters your home. First, we will arrive on your premises to inspect for any signs of carpenter ants or the things that attract them.

We’ll remove whatever we find so your home is pest-free and nothing there encourages them to visit. Next, we’ll issue a preventative treatment to discourage them further. Finally, we do two return visits, one 30-day follow-up and another after 60 days after the treatment.

Such a process ensures that it works successfully. If somehow there are still ants in the home, we’ll eliminate the infestation free of charge. That’s how confident we are it will work. For residential pest control in Toronto that gets the job done, call us.

Killing different pests around the home requires specific knowledge about them, so you can’t just Google “ant exterminator near me” and hope you land on a reputable company with genuine expertise and experience. GreenLeaf Pest Control has helped keep homes in Toronto and the GTA pest-free for years.

You don’t want to see carpenter ants in your home, nor do you want to see the property damage they inflict in their wake. Counting an ant’s legs to identify it will help you determine which type of ant you’re dealing with, but is that how you really want to spend your spare time?

If you think you may have carpenter ants or some other type of pest roaming around and want them fully and quickly gone, call GreenLeaf Pest Control today and let the pros handle it, so you don’t have to.