Pests We Treat - Carpenter Ants in Asbury Park

The black carpenter ant is a wood-destroying insect that bores out holes in wood. Over time, they can cause significant damage. Unfortunately, these ants are of the most common pest infestations faced by New Jersey homeowners. In their natural habitat, carpenter ants are actually beneficial. They help to decompose dead and dying trees. However, once they start invading homes, they become nuisance pests. It is quite alarming to see these large, black workers entering your home to forage for food to bring back to the colony.

Homes built in wooded areas are especially susceptible to carpenter ant infestations. You’ll typically find them nesting nearby in stumps and hollow trees. Removing these insect harborage off your property is an important preventative step. On occasion, these ants will even nest in water-damaged plywood. These ants rarely tunnel into healthy dry wood; instead, they prefer moist, rotting wood and other soft materials to make their satellite nests.  

Experienced pest control technicians at Cowleys know how to quickly resolve these infestations. To get rid of an ant infestation, you must find the nest. As part of our inspection, we carefully trace their scent trails back to the nest. We then plan the best course of action to eliminate the colony. DIY pest control, which often focuses on killing isolated foraging ants, is ineffective because the nest is an ant-producing machine. Instead, we get the job done. We use a non-repellent formulation that gets the ants to unknowingly assist us in eliminating the colony. How do we turn these ants into traitors? Carpenter ants are very social insects. They live as collective units, not as individuals, feeding, grooming and relying on each other to stay alive, and we leverage this behavior in our favor. Once carpenter ants come into contact with our formulation, they become carriers, spreading the chemicals throughout the colony. One affected ant can potentially kill thousands! Using this transfer effect, the colony is soon eliminated and the infestation is gone.