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Bad bugs

| Posted in General Discussion on April 14, 1999 07:32am

*
My neighbor’s outside wall (cedar shingle) is swarming with ants, a slightly reddish-black about half with wings, half without. Definitely ants — three part bodies, 1/4″ long — not carpenter ants, at least not like the carpenter ants we also have around here. I believe they may be damp-wood-eating, or at least wood-dwelling. I discouraged spraying the ants themselves, arguing they should watch them to see where they’re coming from & too so as to locate the nest … but the husband sprayed anyway (he’s a petroleum engineer, uses petroleum products whenever he can). I tried poison bait on some of these ants in our garage fascia without success.

What the heck are they? Any more elegant solutions than the exterminator’s drench everything with Diaznon (sp?)?

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Replies

  1. Guest_ | Apr 02, 1999 09:03am | #1

    *
    andrew

    Scan one of the buggers and lets have a look..

    1. Guest_ | Apr 02, 1999 04:45pm | #2

      *Tried. But they look real different squished.

      1. Guest_ | Apr 02, 1999 06:26pm | #3

        *Andrew,Don't know about where you live, but my area has a county extension office where such bugs can be identified.Barry

        1. Guest_ | Apr 02, 1999 06:30pm | #4

          *Andrew,Have you tried fingerprinting one to get it's ID or alias.

          1. Guest_ | Apr 03, 1999 06:21am | #5

            *Gabe, if I just had your street address I'd be happy to collect a couple thousand with the Dustbuster and send them to you. :)

          2. Guest_ | Apr 03, 1999 07:45am | #6

            *Hell Andrew, our mosquitoes are Boone and Crocket trophy size. And last year I was in Adrian's Cape Breton, and discovered this tiny little bug with power assisted jaws that remove a chunk of your flesh to put in their doggy bags for late lunches called black flies. Don't need your Ants, but thanks anyways. Don't suppose you could send them to Adrian, there's a possibility that they might neutralize the black flies. Whoa might be onto something here.

          3. Guest_ | Apr 03, 1999 07:51am | #7

            *Don't know the specie but I had and infestation-Inoticed them when they started showing up in my office crawling across my desk-traced them to a corner of the room and found a nest under the floor in crawl space AND in the wall. They had a tajmahal in two stud bays floor to ceiling in the insulation! talk about a high rise. They were also in between the sub floor and underlayment. I had to cut out floor and open wall space up and massive chemical application-bout gassed myself, can't remember what I used but was one of those lethal approved garden type ok to sell chemicals. Result-no more ants-I even got all the ones that were on the way to the EPA. They can be nasty -get em quick.

          4. Guest_ | Apr 04, 1999 01:32am | #8

            *If they have on little McRose Tool belts and titanium hammers, then they're the new credit card debt ridden version of carpenter ants.Near the stream,J

          5. Guest_ | Apr 04, 1999 07:17am | #9

            *A had an extermination contractor tell me a while back that if they had 4 body sections they were carpenter ants - less than four were just big ants who get wings in the spring and are ugly but not to worry. So when I talked to my wife while on a business trip and she said "honey, I think we have ants" I told her to count the sections. There were three, so I told her not to worry and I'd tickle her feet when I got home. heh..heh..hehSo the next night I call home and she is a bit more adamant..."DAG NAB IT BOB, THEY ARE FLYING AROUND THE LIVING ROOM AND DIVE BOMBING MY MOTHER'S HAIR!...QUICK MOM, GET UNDER THE TABLE...HERE USE THIS BADMITTEN RACKET!...AND YOU, YOU'D BETTER GET HOME AND TAKE CARE OF THIS BEFORE..." well you can guess how the rest of the conversation went. As soon as I got home I crawled under the house with a flashlight and a dread of enclosed dark places and found them. Thousands of them. Millions of them. Billio...you get the idea. They did in fact have three body sections and they were in fact eating my perfectly dry subfloor. Deal with those critters right away or they'll deal with you. I'M OUT!

          6. Guest_ | Apr 04, 1999 09:12am | #10

            *AntsMore Ants

          7. Guest_ | Apr 04, 1999 10:12pm | #11

            *Ha ah aha ahah aha ....YB, Please tell your family on this sunny Easter Day that I got a great chuckle from your sorelative "Ant And Mother-in-law" story!Near the stream, but on my way to my bro's mountain,J

          8. Guest_ | Apr 08, 1999 06:25pm | #12

            *We've had ants that fit this description appear periodically for 40 years that I remember. Always from the dirt crawlspace or under the basement slab. The swarm once a year then you don't see them again. Did you neighbor's march up the side wall from ground emergence?Any way, all these years I never knew exactly what kind of ants they were till last month a termite inspector on a job told me they are called Citonella Ants. Crush them and they smell like Citronella oil.Kind of disconcerting but not particularly troublesom as far as I can tell.

          9. Guest_ | Apr 08, 1999 08:57pm | #13

            *Yes, they behaved as you describe. I remember reading about these ants in one of Mongo's ant links above.We too decided that they are "just ants."Interesting that this landed under "Construction Techniques."

          10. Guest_ | Apr 09, 1999 12:01am | #14

            *We've had the same problem in our basement in an area which does not have a concrete slab. They tend to swarm when the whether starts to warm up, but they are really just annoying. If you can locate where they are coming out, spray some ant-killer there. This will kill the remaining ones as they come out of the nest. As for the ones in the house already, I just take a vacuum cleaner w/ a hose (shop vac works fine) & walk around & suck them up. There tend to be a lot of them, though, so it takes a while. I've also seen them come through cracks where the concrete slab meets the foundation wall. I must admit we were a bit startled the first time it happened.

          11. Guest_ | Apr 14, 1999 07:30am | #15

            *Boric acid and sugar water in an old jar lid works here. Put it in a trail. But, like AJ sez, those ants are just working.Just another grasshoper, BB

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