Carpenter ants don’t eat wood, but they do excavate it so they can live inside it. They go after wet framing, so if you have a carpenter ant problem, you probably have a leak somewhere.
Carpenter ants are a big problem because they can and often do carve up framing timber. They do this so they can make sheltered places to live inside. Their goal is not to eat the wood. Of course, no matter what their intentions are, you don’t exactly want ants eating the structural wood of your home.
Sound and dry framing is very hard for carpenter ants to chew. They don’t consider it to be worth the effort, so they go instead for wood that has been wet for long enough to start decaying. That, they can easily chew through. It also means that if you have carpenter ants, you probably have a leak in your home.
Sill plates and band joists tend to attract carpenter ants because they’re often near grade. Framing around leaking or poorly flashed windows and doors is another common situation where carpenter ants go to work. If you have a leak in your roof, they might go for rafters. If you have drainage problems on your deck, they might go for the ledger board that ties it to the house.
North Jersey conditions do you no favors here. Freeze-thaw cycles open flashing and siding gaps every winter, with ice dams backing water into roof framing. Older housing stock has plenty of original trim and flashing details that have long since aged out.
To tell if you have carpenter ants, look for coarse and fibrous sawdust piled beneath slit openings. This is one of the clearest signs you can find other than outright spotting large black ants indoors during winter. You can sometimes hear them in the form of faint and dry rustling inside a wall at night. Winged swarmers tend to show up around windows in spring. Once they have gone to work, you can sometimes hear a hollow sound when you tap wood.
If you have carpenter ants, you’ll first need to treat the main colony and any satellite nests. Then you will need to treat the moisture source and repair or replace damaged framing. After you clear out the ants, you will want to seal gaps that allow them into your home. It also helps to trim branches away from the roofline, move firewood away from the walls, and pull mulch back from the foundation.
If carpenter ants are working in your framing, Mosquito Squad of North Jersey can help. Mosquito Squad treats the ant colonies outside your home and the entry points they use. This will help you protect the wood your house depends on.
