Fire ants dwell in many of the hotter regions of the world and in the majority of countries and in the majority of languages, from Thai to French and English, the word 'fire' is part of its name. This is because the feeling of pain after having been stung, not bitten, by one of these ants is like the pain received from a burn.

Most ants that cause pain to humans bite first and then spray acid into the cut, but fire ants bite in order to get a grip and then sting with the body. The liquid that they inject is an alkaloid venom which is painful to humans.

It is also an insecticide and some observers think that the nurse-worker fire ants spray this toxin over the eggs to prevent infection. Fire ants are easily distinguished by their red to copper-brown heads and dark to black bodies. They are between two and six millimetres in length and their mandibles or jaws look like jagged garden secateurs.

Fire ants make nests in the soil and often build up large heaps of earth, although sometimes this is concealed by a fallen tree of a pile of vegetation. The nests can be five feet deep and the anthills over a foot above ground. They prefer moist to damp ground, so the nests can frequently be found on the banks of a river, on the edge of a pond or on a well-tended lawn. The nests are established by one or more queens and can very quickly mature to thousands of ants.

If you have fire ants in your house or garden, you will almost certainly want to get rid of them. This is not so hard, but if you do not annihilate every colony, then one of two surviving queens can produce a new nest of thousands of ants in about a month. There are plenty of poisons to kill ants on the market, and if you want to try an almost guaranteed chemical ant killer, pick one of those.

Otherwise you may want to try one of the following household treatments.

Nematodes are very small insects that live in damp soil. They eat other insects including ants. You can purchase nematodes in a garden centre or on line. Combine them with rain, not tap water, because chlorine will kill them, then pour this water into the nest. The nematodes will have wiped out the ants within about two weeks. This is a wholly green way of killing fire ants.

Some people swear by club soda. Pour a bottle of club soda into the nest, the gas that the soda produces is said to kill the queen and the reproductive ants.

Soapy water is also said to kill ants. Use the same bowl of soapy washing up water and tip it over the nest, the soap is said to kill them outright.

Boric acid is repellent to ants. so you can sprinkle it around the foundation of your house and around the nest.

There are quite a few organic methods of getting rid of fire ants, if you want to learn more, search on the Internet.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on many topics, but is at present concerned with how to kill fire ants. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Killing Carpenter Ants.

categories: ants,insects,pests,home improvement,home repairs,animals,gardening,landscaping,pets,biology,science,outdoors,other,uncategorised

Written by Owen Jones using tags: animals, ants, Biology, gardening, home improvement, home repairs, insects, landscaping, outdoors, pests, Pets, science, uncategorised, urns-and-ants

There are over 1,000 species of carpenter ants. The majority of of them are big, between a quarter of an inch and an inch long, and black, although there are red ones too. There are even a few species in South East Asia which will explode if attacked, ejecting a gluey liquid out through their heads which immobilizes the invaders. The exploding carpenter ant dies.

Carpenter ants are said to do a lot of damage to timber, as they gnaw their way up the middle through its length. However, this is a popular myth, unlike termites, carpenters do not eat wood, they gnaw their way through it to get somewhere. They spit the chewed wood out. This is called frass and it can often be seen in heaps like sawdust. It is a good sign that carpenters are active in or around your house.

Carpenter ants like to travel through the length of wet or decayed dead timber in much the same way as termites do although they do not consume the wood. Carpenters feed on dead insects, dead animals and honeydew from aphids and scale insects outside the home, but if they come inside your home they will be searching for dropped or uncovered food, especially anything sweet and sugary. Therefore, hygiene is an important factor in clearing carpenters out of your home.

These ants will walk up to a hundred yards while foraging, but they like to be near a recurring supply of food. A characteristic of carpenter ant colonies is that they may build satellite nests away from their main colony. This is often why they enter a home.

If they frequently find spilled food in the kitchen, they may make a nest in the wall to take advantage of it, especially if the window or door frame is a bit rotten. Inside the home, they will probably nest in a cavity wall, outside the home they like to build nests in decaying tree stumps.

It is no good spraying carpenter ants with insecticide if you want to get rid of them - particularly if you kill large numbers of them. This may seem odd, but the reason is that the colony will miss these workers and so the queen will increase her production of eggs to compensate it. If she over compensates, you are in a worse position that you were before spraying.

The only way to destroy a nest of carpenter ants is to kill the queen and the whole colony with poison. This is not tricky although it does take a bit of investigative work. Carpenters are most active between twilight and midnight, so put out honey on glass or sticky tape where they are active and follow them when they take it home.

Do not forget, they may have a number of nests in their colony. If you need light, wrap red cellophane over a normal flashlight, because ants can not perceive red light. When you have found their nests, put poison down outside each nest as directed on the label. Do this for several days in a row until you do not see anymore carpenter ants. If you are still getting them, you have missed a nest.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on many subjects, but is currently concerned with Getting Rid Of Carpenter Ants. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Killing Carpenter Ants.

categories: ants,insects,pests,home improvement,home repairs,animals,gardening,landscaping,pets,biology,science,outdoors,other,uncategorised

Written by Owen Jones using tags: animals, ants, Biology, gardening, home improvement, home repairs, insects, landscaping, outdoors, pests, Pets, science, uncategorised

Carpenter ants are big ants that live in many parts of the world. They like to build their nests or colonies from dead, damp timber. However, contrary to popular opinion, they do not feed on wood as termites do.

They use wood to construct their colonies and tunnel through it in their quest for new sources of food. This is evidenced by heaps of frass, which is the detritus that the carpenter ants have chewed out of usually damp. dead wood.

There are over a thousand species of these large, typically black ants, which belong to the genus Camponotus. Carpenter ants live in nests and have colonies both indoors and outdoors in moist, decaying or hollow timber. They like to travel through this decaying timber by cutting out galleries or walkways in timber length-ways up the grain in order to provide passageways from one part of the to another.

The parts of a house that are most likely to be of concern to carpenter ants are floor joists, window frames and rafters in the roof. In fact, anywhere where you are likely to have a problem with water ingress. Decks and porches are also obviously at risk.

An interesting fact about carpenter ants is that some species produce inhabitants that can explode in order to kill attackers. These so-called exploding ants are found mostly in South East Asia where there are at least nine kinds that can cause their bodies to explode, thereby committing suicide.

These ants have a massive abdomen which produces a type of glue which is shot out of the head onto attackers. The exploding ant dies, but all the attackers caught up in this mesh of glue are immobilized as well.

How do you know whether you have carpenter ants or not? Well, the best way of distinguishing carpenter ants from other ants is by looking at their waists. A carpenter ant has only one node or hump and their thorax or upper body is well-rounded and smooth. Other similar ants have more than one node or an uneven or two-tiered back.

If you are looking at flying ants, then the difference between carpenter ants and termites, with which they are often confused, is that carpenter ants have darker-coloured bodies, narrow waists, elbowed or bent antennae and, if they have them, the rear wings are smaller than the front wings.

Another factor is that carpenter ants are quite happy to come out and be seen, whereas termites are light-shy, even though carpenter ants are most active between dusk and mid-night and reproductive termites will take to the air during the day time.

Carpenter ants eat protein and sugar such as other insects, living or dead and spilled honey or sugar. This honey can also be extracted from aphids or greenfly, which is called honeydew. Therefore, if you want to trace carpenter worker ants back to their nest or nests, you have to lay down something like honey and watch the ants take the food back to their nests. This is the first step in destroying colonies of carpenter ants.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few subjects, but is currently concerned with Getting Rid Of Carpenter Ants. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Killing Carpenter Ants.

categories: ants,insects,pests,home improvement,home repairs,animals,gardening,landscaping,pets,biology,science,outdoors,other,uncategorised

Written by Owen Jones using tags: animals, antonline-dp-ua, ants, Biology, gardening, home improvement, home repairs, insects, landscaping, outdoors, pests, Pets, science, uncategorised