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To: SamAdams76
Big and little ants ... the little ants are scavengers, the big ant is a Carpenter ant eating your home. Call Orkin
19 posted on 05/20/2021 3:36:27 PM PDT by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now its your turn)
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To: PIF

Good, but carpenter ants don’t eat wood, they mine in it for a place to lay eggs. This is why they go into the house and move in the walls. Carpenter ants feed primarily on insect honeydew, plant and fruit juices, insects and other arthropods. Inside, they will also feed on sweets, eggs, meats, cakes and grease. The workers will forage up to 300 feet from their nest and you could have multiple nests in your home. The best way to get rid of them is by using dursban wp. But the government restricted its use in 1996 due to possible problems with children exposure. Dursban is an organophospate insecticide and a member of a class of chemicals developed during World War II to attack the nervous system.

A professional can use it by drilling a hole in the walls ever 13 inches and spraying the wp in. WP stands for wettable powder which means it sprays in as a liquid, dries to a powder, and foraging ants find it, eat it and get it on them, and then return to the nest where the regurgitate it for other ants to include small ones called minors to consume. They die and the new ones in eggs hatching won’t have any to help them and they will die. Otherwise you will have to tent the building and that can run some big dollars as left alone, they will cause a lot of damage tearing up your foundation and struts. If you see dead or live ones in or around the house, they are there and will find a way in. Look, also, for fine sawdust in window sills or baseboards as that is called frass and means they are tearing up wood. Good luck.

I could tell you a lot more about carpenter ants as they amaze me with their ability to survive and recognize nest needs somehow. We humans should do as well. And to my knowledge, when a dead ant is retrieved, no one knows what happens to it. If two nests in the walls have a war, at some point they stop and retrieve their dead like you mentioned. After that, a lot of speculation.

wy69


49 posted on 05/20/2021 4:53:56 PM PDT by whitney69
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