Have you seen the writing on the wall? Have you noticed signs that your home has carpenter ants, but have been hoping to ignore the problem? It is actually a common issue. Carpenter ants don't give too many indications that there is a serious problem. Here is how it usually goes.

One Ant

You probably don’t think too much about it when you find an ant crawling around in the kitchen every once in awhile. You probably do what most people do. You squish it with some paper towels or tissue paper and throw it into the trash, but what you don't know is that most ants stick close to the nest until food is found. The ant you squished was a scout. There could be hundreds or even thousands in your walls. How is this possible? After all, don't they have to eat? Yes! But they don't have to eat anything that is inside your home. They do just fine feeding on the things that are outside of your home.

Some Sawdust

You might have been down in the cellar doing some laundry or getting a box out of storage and saw a few piles of sawdust and didn't even realize what you were looking at. Most people don't know that carpenter ants push sawdust out of kick out holes and that this sawdust is often found in the cellar.

A Few Winged Ants

For the last few years you may have been finding a dozen or so winged insects on the inside windows of your home and simply vacuuming them up. That is certainly an easy way to get rid of them. The problem is those winged ants are a warning sign that you have a mature nest inside the walls of your home, and if this has been going on for years, you may have a few nests.

A Line of Big Black Ants

If you have seen a long line of black ants going to and from your pet’s food dish, an apple core left by one of your kids behind the couch, or some other food source, you may still have missed it as a warning sign. It is easy to think that those ants came in through an entry point in your exterior walls, and not from a nest within your walls.

It is important to recognize the warning signs of carpenter ants. These pests are responsible for millions of dollars in property damage across the U.S. each and every year.

Carpenter ants are a problem here in Minnesota. If you're finding them in your house, Adams Pest Control can get them out. There are over 22,000 pest control companies in the U.S., and only 3% are qualified to be designated QualityPro Certified. Adams Pest Control is one of them. Serving the Twin Cities, Brainerd and Duluth as well as most of Minnesota and Western Wisconsin, you can trust our QualityPro team to make sure your home is free of these destructive wood chewing pests. Every time!