Ant & Carpenter Ant Control, Collingwood

Carpenter ants do not eat wood. They excavate it to nest in, and they strongly prefer wood that is already damp and beginning to soften. That single fact is why a carpenter ant call is usually a water call wearing a different hat.

Where the moisture comes from here

The escarpment side of this area is wooded, shaded and wet, and the housing on it is full of the conditions carpenter ants want: decks and posts against damp ground, roof valleys that shed onto a wall, ice-dam damage from lake-effect snow loads sitting in a soffit, and firewood stacked against the house because the woodstove is thirty feet away.

Ice damming deserves a specific mention. A heavy snowbelt winter that backs meltwater up under the shingles leaves a wet roof deck and a wet top plate, and by the following summer that is prime nesting material. A carpenter ant problem appearing the year after a bad ice-dam winter is not a coincidence.

Parent and satellite nests

The distinction that decides the treatment. The parent colony — with the queen — is usually outside in a stump, a dead limb, a pile of stored timber or a landscape tie. Satellite nests, holding workers and older brood, are what end up in your structure.

Killing the ants you can see does nothing about either. The work is to trace the trail back, find and treat the parent colony, and deal with the satellites in the building — which means the inspection includes the yard, not just the kitchen.

The sign worth knowing: coarse sawdust-like frass, often with insect fragments in it, accumulating below a small opening. That is excavated wood being pushed out and it means a nest in the structure rather than a foraging trail passing through.

The other ants

Pavement ants and pharaoh ants come up too, and they need different handling — pharaoh ants in particular will bud into multiple colonies if sprayed with the wrong product, turning one problem into five. Correct identification matters more with ants than with almost anything else we treat, which is why we would rather see a photograph before quoting.

What we will tell you to fix

Move the woodpile off the wall and up off the ground. Cut back the branches touching the roof — they are a bridge. Fix the gutter that is soaking one corner of the house. Replace the soft wood rather than treating around it. None of that is billable to us, and skipping it is why some properties have this conversation every second summer.