what do you do when you see carpenter ants?

[ponyexpress976]

An old farmer once told me to alway keep one or two friut trees growing out in the yard. Not for the fruit but so that termites and carpenter ants go after the trees and not the house. No idea if its true but I have some planted and no bugs in the house...figured at the very least I'll get some good firewood out of them in a few years.

i've also sprinkled some amdro ant block around my processing area during the summer...going for cheap insurance for any I might bring home.

 

[Streblerm]

I just try and knock them out of the wood when I split it. They seem to loose interest in wood once it is split and stacked. After it is seasoned I have never noticed them in the wood. That and my neighbor's house is closer to my woodpile than my house:msp_rolleyes:

 

[djones]

When I get done splitting up some poplar for the day I just let my chickens out and they go have a feast on the escaping ants. My chickens can spend up to and hour picking over the wood chips that linger around the splitter. The ants look for places to hide but the chickens don't let them get too far. When I'm splitting hardwood I don't have an ant problem but almost every large poplar that I knock down has a carpenter ant colony through it. It's not uncommon to find thousands of ants around my feet while I'm splitting.

 

[Ironworker]

Ants and termites leave once the wood starts to dry, they only like wet wood, plus they will die once exposed to the cold

 

[lmbrman]

inlaws

 

[darkbyrd]

Couple solutions:
1 Burn barrel next to splitter
2 Chicken yard
3 Knock em off, stack it anyway
I've been processing a lot of dead black locust, some of it in different stages of getting hollow, and see the ants all the time. Haven't yet seen them in the wood stacks, only in the unprocessed rounds. I think they only want moist, rotten wood, and I keep that out of my stacks. No need to poison the earth over them, but I keep my wood 100's of yards from anything that really matters until it's burn time.

 

[originalhooker]

what do you do with ants? -- nothing.

they don't hurt anything, actually they help...they only inhabit dead/decaying wood & quicken the decomposition process. in living trees they coupled with are a few other insects, bacteria, fungi get rid of the dead & the trees keep growing (hollows) if there gonna. in firewood not enough habitat so no bother.

 

[WadePatton]

another vote for nothing.

but since i've been studying nutrition, i might bag a few for snacks. i find them in cherry and sassafras and locust. if a piece of wood is really full, i pitch it to the side, then load it last onto my truck or trailer. they dissipate naturally.

nucular napalm attacks are reserved for fire ants and yellow jackets/ground wasps.

 

[sbowman871]

Nada

I cut a standing dead cherry the day after turkey day last year. The base was loaded with the little buggers. We loaded up the rounds and hauled them out a few hours later and dumped them at the splitting site. The next day we split. I don't recall seeing many that day if any. No chemicals, no cussing at them. Saved the cussing for the big round that rolled off the spliitter and onto my foot!

:msp_w00t:

 

[fubar2]

I start humming Foggy Mountain Breakdown and go into sort of an Appalachian Mountain stomp type jig. Yeehaw.

 

[tomtrees58]

Leave it there over a cold night and they should die

Theo things don't die but you can put chocolate on them yum:hmm3grin2orange:

 

[WadePatton]

I sqeal!

like a girl and DROP my saw and RUN away!




oh

wait

i already replied to this one. nevermind.

 

[Bob95065]

I used to see lots of carpenter ants when I lived in the midwest. I used to give them a healthy dose of gasoline and light them up. The heat killed the ants and usually the gas burned off before the wood caught fire. It is a very fast solution to that problem.

 

[1project2many]

what do you do with ants? -- nothing.

they don't hurt anything, actually they help...they only inhabit dead/decaying wood & quicken the decomposition process. in living trees they coupled with are a few other insects, bacteria, fungi get rid of the dead & the trees keep growing (hollows) if there gonna. in firewood not enough habitat so no bother.

That's what I thought, too. They'll go away without hurting anything. They did go away from the splitter alright. And really, they must have thought it wouldn't hurt anything at all if they moved into my barn between the siding and the uprights. Took two summers and a bunch of chemicals to get them out. Now I'll dump a little two stroke mix into the log and that slows them down permanently.

 

[Jules083]

I guess I am just being paraniod. I'm always afraid I'm going to bring home a queen that will start some super house-eating colony or something. This wood will be burned probably around March or so anyways, I'm not one of the three year ahead people.

 

[Dan_IN_MN]

I’ve been cutting dead Elm, standing and laying down, and have found a lot of those black ants! I put a load directly in the basement splitting what I had to. The pieces that had a lot of ants I left them outside. I haven’t checked them for what’s happened to the ants. It will be interesting. I hope they’re all gone! I've seen a few ants in the basement...

When we had chickens, they had no interest in carpenter ants! I thought for sure they’d gobble them up….

Here’s a link about them.


Carpenter ant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[1project2many]

Well, you should get over the paranoia. It's the flying queens that are looking to start a new colony, and they come out in the spring without any invitation. I just figure I'm helping keep the odds in my favor by keeping the immigrants out.

 

[alleyyooper]

I used to throw all my cut wood in a section of the pole barn for a year before burning. I also had sticked lumber next to the section drying. Black ants got into the sticked lumber and nearly destroyed a couple of hundred feet of 2x8 I was going to use on a building project.

I spray them now in the woods no way I am going to bring them near my stick built home or the pole barn and honey house.

Al

 

[newburner]

Make em build you a wood shed...ahhahahaha:msp_biggrin:

 

[fubar2]

Put them in a glass jar and sell them to the neighbor kids.