Carpenter Ants in the Back Cabin

By Donald Holmes Lewis

Published on July 10, 2009 in The Cheboygan Daily Tribune.

    

     This past Tuesday I made another list. I had a lot of things on it I wanted to do, almost fifteen total, and a couple my wife put on it for me. My stuff started with “Split More Wood” but her two stared at me in a way that blurred everything else: “Ants” and “Mice.”  

     After coffee, she led me across the yard, up the outside stairway, and into to the back cabin bedroom over the garage.  In the smallest bedroom, the one you can hardly fit a single bed into, she pointed to the wall where she’d pulled back a piece of duct tape that someone, me, had placed over a hole in the wall five years ago.

     “Carpenter ants. Look at the saw dust. I can almost hear them chewing on our wood for breakfast.”

     “I’ll call the pest control people.”

     “You are the pest control people.”

     “What about the mice?”

     “They’re not eating the house.”

     At the Do It Center store, a man with a red vest walked me down the aisle where you select weapons for this kind of war. Winking at me from their places on the shelves were the WMD of insect killers. There was one, the Hot Shot Fogger, which drew me to the label.

     “What’s in this stuff?” I asked innocently.

     “Bug killer for the most part.”

     When the man left me alone, I went through an amateur analysis of ingredients on all the different products. I had to use my reading glasses the print was so small.  All I could discern was the simple fact that whatever you get is diluted by close to 99% or more. Strong stuff. But while most of the labels bragged about killing power, when it came to carpenter ants every fogger and sprayer noted the importance of finding the nests. Nests? Nests are for birds.

     Rather than make a purchase, I figured a trip home to research carpenter ants on the internet might be a better idea.

     Google. Carpenter Ants. Google. Carpenter Ant Nests. A 559,000 search history. A lot of people have ant problems.

     The more I read, the less I felt ready to tackle the problem. First, I got the general picture. They don’t eat wood. They nest in wood. That’s where the damage comes from. That wasn’t going to make my wife any happier about living with them. They have a caste system like in India. There’s the Queens. That figures. Winged Males. Of course aren’t we all.  Major Workers. That was easier before the economic crisis. Minor Workers. That’s the category  my wife would most likely pick for me. I wasn’t getting anywhere, especially since the articles all talked about the importance of finding the nests and how difficult that can be.

     So I switched to identification versus other bugs. Maybe we didn’t have carpenter ants at all. Maybe we just had Visitor Ants and they already had their bags packed, ready to vacation in the great outdoor. I learned to spot the difference between regular ant workers and the more ambitious carpenter ant workers. I wondered if they checked in at the union hall before getting work.

    Termites versus carpenter ants. No problem. Not that I didn’t have termites at our cottage. But they were not the enemy of the moment.

     I discovered things about the seasonal habits of carpenter ants. North facing nests stay dormant all winter. South ones have a creepy crawling movement to them year round. I read about how the Queens drop their wings when they’re ready to mate. Sounded familiar. I took pity on the poor guys in the trenches searching for food. They all need moisture. Wet places with room to spread out the furniture. Their outside nests usually start in rotting woodpiles and then they make for the hotel where they prefer sugar snacks to anything else.

     That was it. Rotting, wet, unattended for years kind of wood. I’d been collecting it for over a decade behind the garage right below the new headquarters of the Mullet Lake Carpenter Ant Association, dues optional. My back cabin bedrooms.

     It took me no more than a half hour to get to the hardware store again and get back with my super ant killer spray bottle, the one with a handy attachment for mass application in case my adversaries noticed what I was up to and attacked. I would if someone threatened my fancy new digs.

     An hour later I was finished. Of course, according to the literature it would take a month to know whether I commanded an effective deterrent to their invasion. In fact, one line haunted me. It said “you may never now if carpenter ants have been completely eradicated.” But I crossed “Ants” off my list. Next up: “Mice.” Back to the computer.