Is the wood in your home being eaten away by tiny insects? Many people commonly misidentify what exactly is consuming the wood in their homes. The two main culprits when wood shavings are found next to destroyed wood are carpenter ants and termites, but how do you tell the difference between them?

Carpenter Ant

Identification

Identification is trickier that it may seem, because both insect are tiny bugs with wings that destroy wood. Interestingly, carpenter ants just use the wood in your home to make nests in to raise their young gaining no nutritional value from it, while termites actually eat the wood to stay alive. Still, to the untrained eye, a number of traits must be determined to get a proper ID since they do look very similar.

Body

Carpenter ant bodies are pinched at the waist (like a traditional ant) while Termite bodies are straight with no pinch in the middle of the abdomen.

Wings

On a termite, both sets of wings are the same size. The carpenter ant also has two sets of wings but one wing in each set is longer that the other.

Color

Termites are uniformly brown normally, but carpenter ants come in a variety of different colors such as a red and black mix, just red, just black, yellow, orange, or brown.

Behavior

Termites normally swarm in the spring time, but carpenter ants can swarm all year round.

Treatment

Winged Termite

Carpenter ants should never be treated with over the counter sprays or liquid insecticides. This will harm the environment without getting rid of the pest. Just killing off some ants will not affect the entire colony in any meaningful way whatsoever.

In order to remove the ant completely from the home, the colony must be found by careful inspection to uncover the entry way of the nest, usually marked by a thin pile of saw dust. Once the nest is located, proper insecticides or removal methods must be implemented by professionals.

Termite treatment differs slightly from carpenter ant treatment in that instead of looking for a nest entrance as with carpenter ants, a professional will look for “mud tubes” a way in which termites seal their entrances. Once these special access points and pathways are found through careful inspection, bait can placed outside the mud enclosures.

It is very important to take care of either infestation as quickly as humanly possible to avoid the insect spreading and destroying more wood. If left untreated, these pests can destroy a home easily. For quick and effective Phoenix ant control and Phoenix termite control, get in touch with Preventive Pest Control.