What to Do If Carpenter Ants Invade Your Northern New Jersey Home
If you see signs of large, dull black carpenter ants around or in your northern New Jersey home (see our last post), do NOT reach for the Raid. Spraying carpenter ants with home or garden insecticides will at best kill the few ants you see. But it won’t do a thing to the tens of thousands of their nest mates who are tunneling into the structural wood of your northern New Jersey home. What it will do is activate the formidable self-protection instincts these ants have. When threatened, carpenter ant colonies will simply abandon the poisonous area and relocate their nests and wood-destroying activities to a new area in your home.
The only effective way to rid your northern New Jersey home of carpenter ants is with professional pest control. Heritage Pest Control’s experienced ant control professionals will set out special ant baits. As foraging carpenter ants crawl through and feed on poison-laced baits, they ingest the poison. Additional poison clings to their bodies and is carried back to the nest. Ants are communal insects. As foraging worker ants return to the nest, they groom the queen and other colony members and feed their nest mates regurgitated food, slowly spreading the poison to all colony members.
Annual home protection inspections ensure that carpenter ants do not return.