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The Ants are Coming! · PEST PROSpectives

• 0:09
  Richard Piet: I'm Richard Piet.
• 0:09
  Richard Piet: Welcome back to another of our pest perspectives episodes, talking with the pest pros about pest control and their approach and things you should know as it relates to what kind of pests are out there, how we identify them, how we deal with them.
• 0:28
  Richard Piet: Today's topic really is very common Ants.
• 0:33
  Richard Piet: Amber Byers is back with us, associate certified entomologist at Pest Pros of Michigan.
• 0:40
  Richard Piet: She oversees field operations there as well.
• 0:43
  Richard Piet: Hello, Amber.
• 0:45
  Amber Byars: Hey Richard.
• 0:46
  Richard Piet: So there are some pretty common ants in southwest Michigan, is that right?
• 0:52
  Richard Piet: When you think of the most common, which ones come to mind?
• 0:57
  Amber Byars: Yeah, absolutely.
• 0:57
  Amber Byars: We get ant calls probably more often than any other general pest call during the summer, and there's a couple of top hitting favorites.
• 1:06
  Amber Byars: We have the carpenter ants, the acrobat ants and odorous house ants.
• 1:12
  Amber Byars: Those are the three ones, oh, and I want to throw in pavement ants with that.
• 1:16
  Amber Byars: Those are the top ones that we see that we're dealing with.
• 1:19
  Richard Piet: Well, I can tell you, I see the pavement ones and I'll tell you about that as we move along.
• 1:24
  Richard Piet: Carpenter ants, though these ones can be a little scary because they like wood and they chew on it.
• 1:33
  Amber Byars: Carpenter ants are considered the wood-destroying insect.
• 1:35
  Amber Byars: They are one of the top pests that we see when we are doing a lot of our inspections for our real estate friends.
• 1:42
  Amber Byars: That actually goes on the state forum to be kind of a critical pest when people are buying homes.
• 1:48
  Amber Byars: So yeah, they're the larger black ant.
• 1:50
  Amber Byars: They prefer the moist, decaying wood.
• 1:53
  Amber Byars: They don't eat wood, which is a common misperception.
• 1:56
  Amber Byars: They just utilize the wood as a nesting area and so they kind of like their name carpenter.
• 2:03
  Amber Byars: They will kind of excavate that wood and create galleries inside of it, unlike termites right who are actually consuming that cellulose material.
• 2:12
  Amber Byars: And then some of the signs we see associated with carpenter ants are going to be that frass that gets kicked out of those galleries.
• 2:18
  Amber Byars: When they're excavating that wood looks like kind of like wood shavings and then the hollow wood that's left behind afterwards and sometimes you can actually see the live winged reproductives, the live larger ants with wings.
• 2:32
  Richard Piet: So they're just making a nice ant condo.
• 2:35
  Amber Byars: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:37
  Richard Piet: Out of your condo.
• 2:38
  Amber Byars: Out of our structure.
• 2:39
  Amber Byars: They're making their own little homes.
• 2:41
  Richard Piet: Yeah, they're very appreciative, I'm sure.
• 2:43
  Richard Piet: So I'm really curious about acrobat ants.
• 2:47
  Richard Piet: What are they?
• 2:47
  Richard Piet: Gymnasts or something?
• 2:49
  Richard Piet: Are they tumbling?
• 2:50
  Richard Piet: What are they doing?
• 2:51
  Amber Byars: Yeah, the funny thing is they get that name because when they're disturbed their abdomen kind of flexes up and kind of bends up towards their thorax and their head, so it gives this little cute acrobatic movement.
• 3:04
  Amber Byars: That's how they got that name.
• 3:06
  Amber Byars: They're a smaller ant.
• 3:08
  Amber Byars: They have a characteristic that can differentiate them from any other ant and it's a diamond shaped abdomen.
• 3:14
  Amber Byars: So that last segment on the ant will have a nice pointed tip, almost kind of heart shaped but a little diamond shape, and they also will nest in rotting wood.
• 3:24
  Amber Byars: And we can see signs of them by getting pieces of any part of the structure that they're nesting in getting kicked out.
• 3:31
  Amber Byars: I've seen a lot of spray foam insulation or just foam board insulation getting chewed up and then kicked out of little galleries.
• 3:38
  Amber Byars: That's going to be the top sign of an acrobat ant infestation.
• 3:42
  Richard Piet: So they like to nest also, like the carpenters do.
• 3:46
  Richard Piet: They just don't necessarily choose wood.
• 3:49
  Amber Byars: Yeah, they can do some damage to wooden structural components.
• 3:54
  Richard Piet: And that's a good point with carpenter, ants and acrobats, right that the damage they do could cross a threshold, to a point where you have, dare I say, structural damage.
• 4:05
  Richard Piet: I mean, does it go that far?
• 4:07
  Amber Byars: Oh, it definitely can.
• 4:08
  Amber Byars: I would say, more so with the carpenter ants, because they have much larger colonies and they're much larger and I've seen damage related to carpenter ants over an acrobat ant.
• 4:17
  Amber Byars: But acrobat ants are messy and, again, because of their nature of nesting in wood, they're technically an arboreal ant.
• 4:24
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 4:24
  Richard Piet: What other species do we focus on?
• 4:27
  Richard Piet: You had a couple that you thought of immediately.
• 4:30
  Amber Byars: Odorous house ants and pavement ants.
• 4:32
  Amber Byars: And again, these are on the smaller side of the ant, but odorous house ants are probably one of the most common that we see in structurally infesting, where clients are calling and saying I got these tiny little ants all over my kitchen.
• 4:46
  Amber Byars: Those are typically odorous house ants.
• 4:48
  Amber Byars: They have a characteristic why they smell really bad.
• 4:51
  Amber Byars: If you pinch one and smell it, it's going to have like a rotten coconut smell when it's crushed.
• 4:57
  Amber Byars: So it's not frowned upon.
• 4:59
  Richard Piet: People do this across the industry, so it's a means of confirming what you're looking at.
• 5:05
  Richard Piet: I guess that reminds me of stink bugs, but that's a whole other conversation, I guess.
• 5:11
  Amber Byars: Yes, yes sir.
• 5:13
  Richard Piet: So you mentioned pavement ants, so here's what I see.
• 5:16
  Richard Piet: When it gets to be springtime, all of a sudden, out of the crack of the driveway, there will be a sand mound and a zillion of them Coming out of there.
• 5:27
  Richard Piet: Is that a pavement ant?
• 5:30
  Amber Byars: There could be some other species that do that, but generally speaking, yes, pavement ants are going to be the ones that are pushing that soily, dirt, sandy dirt up through those cracks around the pavement slabs right near the home, and so they can pop up inside the garage, like right at that strip in the garage, and they will enter the structure and they can be structurally nesting if they find like a nice area inside of a wall void or something too.
• 5:56
  Richard Piet: That's a little scary to contemplate.
• 5:58
  Richard Piet: Do they cause damage?
• 6:00
  Amber Byars: They do not no.
• 6:01
  Richard Piet: Okay, they're just making a mess, hanging out like their cousins do and making themselves comfortable.
• 6:08
  Amber Byars: Yes, exactly.
• 6:09
  Richard Piet: Why do they suddenly all emerge and you'll see a bunch of them and that sand, and then they'll just be gone again.
• 6:17
  Richard Piet: It's like they come out for some air and go back in.
• 6:21
  Amber Byars: Yeah, foraging also could be weather related.
• 6:23
  Amber Byars: But, yeah, definitely looking for resources, and that's, generally speaking, for any ant.
• 6:28
  Amber Byars: We get a lot of questions about you know why do I have ants?
• 6:31
  Amber Byars: And I wonder if my neighbor is dealing with this and like, really ants are just foraging creatures.
• 6:38
  Amber Byars: So they will seek out resources, whether that's food, water, shelter, and so they are going to be doing that behavior.
• 6:46
  Amber Byars: When you're seeing a trail of ants, that's what they're doing.
• 6:48
  Amber Byars: They're looking for something that is going to be beneficial for them.
• 6:52
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 6:52
  Richard Piet: How do you spot an ant infestation?
• 6:56
  Amber Byars: Typically it's going to be the live ants, the trailing ants and, based off of the species like we were talking about earlier, you might see signs associated with that specific species.
• 7:07
  Amber Byars: For example, carpenter ants you're going to see the piles of sawdust, acrobat ants.
• 7:13
  Amber Byars: You can also see that debris getting kicked out of, maybe near an electrical unit, because again that's where some of that spray foam insulation is going to be.
• 7:21
  Amber Byars: And then odorous house ants.
• 7:23
  Amber Byars: They have long trails so, and they're going to be going from a place of their nesting and to the food source or the water source or something that's spilled.
• 7:32
  Amber Byars: So especially like sweet material, syrupy material, stuff like that.
• 7:37
  Richard Piet: So there'll be like a little super highway following each other back and forth.
• 7:41
  Amber Byars: Yeah, exactly and that.
• 7:42
  Amber Byars: And they can also be in really weird spots like up underneath the lip of the cabinet, the splashback of the sink, you know.
• 7:49
  Amber Byars: So they'll be crawling back there.
• 7:50
  Amber Byars: And if you have a nice colored marble top counter, that might be really hard to see until all of a sudden you're like, wow, there's so many.
• 7:59
  Richard Piet: Here they are.
• 8:00
  Richard Piet: Is that typically what happens?
• 8:02
  Richard Piet: There's something sweet they like that attracts them, and there they are, and maybe we don't see them right away until they've told two friends, and so on and so on, as the old commercial used to say.
• 8:14
  Amber Byars: Yeah, because we have to remember that, even though they don't have voices like us, they still communicate, and they will communicate with pheromones, and so they're going to be communicating back and forth between touch and pheromone scent.
• 8:25
  Amber Byars: Hey, come this way.
• 8:27
  Amber Byars: There's a food source here, right?
• 8:30
  Richard Piet: Hey guys over here, yeah, like that.
• 8:34
  Amber Byars: Exactly.
• 8:34
  Amber Byars: And there you go.
• 8:35
  Amber Byars: You got that trail started.
• 8:37
  Richard Piet: They're very good communicators, All right.
• 8:39
  Richard Piet: So what happens now?
• 8:41
  Richard Piet: Someone calls you and says I have ants.
• 8:43
  Richard Piet: How do you approach it?
• 8:45
  Amber Byars: We touched on our integrated pest management model.
• 8:47
  Amber Byars: A couple of weeks ago.
• 8:49
  Amber Byars: So we perform every service under that umbrella.
• 8:52
  Amber Byars: So first we're going to start off with a thorough inspection.
• 8:55
  Amber Byars: We're going to make sure that we know exactly what we're dealing with, where the ants are coming from, what kind of ants they are, and sometimes we might not know the exact species, but we're going to at least know an appropriate amount about that specific ant before we move forward.
• 9:09
  Amber Byars: Once we determine nesting sites and ant species, we're going to then move forward typically with like a bait.
• 9:17
  Amber Byars: We try to start with gel baits or granular baits try to get some control of the colony.
• 9:22
  Amber Byars: That does a couple of things.
• 9:23
  Amber Byars: One, it's low impact on the environment, so we utilize gel baits for specific species.
• 9:28
  Amber Byars: That's kind of got more of a sweeter kind of build to it.
• 9:31
  Amber Byars: And then we also have like a protein-based bait.
• 9:34
  Amber Byars: It's a granular bait that's really good for other um the field and the carpenter ants.
• 9:38
  Amber Byars: But we'll try to gel bait the colony first and get control that way, and some combination spot treatments with an appropriately labeled pesticide.
• 9:47
  Amber Byars: And so we'll utilize those two methods and typically within a couple of weeks of doing that, once we've done the thorough inspection and determined the nesting sites, and then we applied the appropriate products, we see success after about two weeks.
• 10:02
  Amber Byars: Sometimes with larger colonies and we're talking the odorous house ants and the carpenter ants that process can be elongated a little bit because the colony is large when you say gel bait, this means that they are feasting on that and bringing it back to the colony.
• 10:21
  Richard Piet: Is that right?
• 10:22
  Amber Byars: yeah.
• 10:22
  Amber Byars: So here's some really cool uh facts about ants.
• 10:25
  Amber Byars: Adult ants cannot chew or swallow solid foods.
• 10:30
  Amber Byars: When we're talking like the gel bait, they can consume that fully.
• 10:36
  Amber Byars: They can ingest it, swallow it, and the way that they pass that is through excretions.
• 10:42
  Amber Byars: With the larger granular baits that's a solid material.
• 10:47
  Amber Byars: They will capture that and then carry it back in their mandibles to their larval stage inside the colony.
• 10:55
  Amber Byars: So the larval stage is inside the colony.
• 10:58
  Amber Byars: The queen's protecting those, keeping them safe.
• 11:00
  Amber Byars: The worker ants will bring that solid food back and feed it to the larva, which have chewing mouth parts.
• 11:06
  Amber Byars: So the larva will actually eat that and then they will have excretions that the adults will eat and that's how that material gets shared between the colony.
• 11:16
  Richard Piet: Boy, did you know that about ants?
• 11:18
  Richard Piet: That's incredible.
• 11:19
  Richard Piet: So it does its job.
• 11:21
  Richard Piet: All you have to do is introduce them to that and away it goes.
• 11:26
  Amber Byars: And introduce enough of it.
• 11:27
  Amber Byars: That's a really common misperception that people have, especially industry-wide, where they don't use enough bait.
• 11:33
  Amber Byars: The colony's mature, you're going to need 60 to 90 grams of bait and it comes in sometimes comes in very small application tubes, so people use just a couple of grams at a time and then they'll see treatment failure.
• 11:49
  Richard Piet: Okay.
• 11:49
  Richard Piet: One thing to think about, though.
• 11:52
  Richard Piet: We could probably try and prevent them to begin with.
• 11:55
  Richard Piet: Is that a good thought?
• 11:58
  Amber Byars: There's definitely ways to prevent certain ant infestations Absolutely.
• 12:03
  Richard Piet: So a couple of weeks and they're out with the appropriate amount of treatment and then going forward after that.
• 12:13
  Richard Piet: What should we, as homeowners or building managers, do to prevent a recurrence?
• 12:20
  Amber Byars: Anything that's attractive, kind of out of reach for ants, is one of those key components.
• 12:24
  Amber Byars: So making sure that you don't have a lot of crumbs or you know spilled soda or you know maple syrup stuff, stuff like that kind of sprinkled around, you want to keep those, keep it nice and clean and sanitized.
• 12:37
  Amber Byars: Keeping your food materials in locked containers, kind of out of reach to be accessed, of reach to be accessed.
• 12:50
  Amber Byars: Fixing any type of moisture issue, because ants are always going to be attracted to areas of moisture because they need that water source and with carpenter ants they are more attracted to decayed wood.
• 12:58
  Amber Byars: So if there's some sort of leak causing wood decay or wood rot, that's going to be an attractive area for those ants to nest.
• 13:06
  Amber Byars: Sealing up entry points to keeping your doors and windows closed tight, because if you're having those open regularly, that's just an opening for them to come into.
• 13:14
  Amber Byars: Trimming back tree branches, vegetation, overgrown vegetation that's going to be contacting the structure is basically like a superhighway bridge for ants to access.
• 13:26
  Amber Byars: And then the last thing would be to have regular inspections and or treatments preventatively in the future.
• 13:34
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 13:35
  Richard Piet: So before we go, what's the number one piece of advice for homeowners dealing with ants?
• 13:42
  Amber Byars: I would say to definitely contact a professional.
• 13:45
  Amber Byars: The thing about over-the-counter treatment is it will work for a short period of time, maybe it's going to kill some of the worker ants, but it's not going to get to the colony.
• 13:55
  Amber Byars: A lot of those over-the-counter products have a permethrin-based product in it, which is a repellent, and it's going to kill on contact, but it's not going to transfer.
• 14:03
  Amber Byars: And another thing I would recommend is to hire a company that's going to do those thorough inspections prior to treatment so that they know exactly what they're dealing with.
• 14:14
  Richard Piet: And ask them what their approach is.
• 14:16
  Amber Byars: Yeah, exactly.
• 14:17
  Richard Piet: Very good, all right.
• 14:18
  Richard Piet: So there you are.
• 14:19
  Richard Piet: If you're dealing with ants, don't wait.
• 14:22
  Richard Piet: Reach out to someone preferably Pest Pros and Amber.
• 14:24
  Richard Piet: Reach out to Pest Pros and Amber they can help for sure, and take care of that assessment, do the integrated pest management approach and help you eliminate the infestation.
• 14:36
  Richard Piet: In fact, we did talk with Amber about IPM integrated pest management in a prior episode.
• 14:43
  Richard Piet: So subscribe to Pest Perspectives so you're alerted when those come up, and then you see the list of prior episodes that we have recorded and deployed so you can hear about that too.
• 14:52
  Richard Piet: Amber Byars, thank you for this info.
• 14:56
  Amber Byars: Of course.
• 14:56
  Amber Byars: Thank you so much.