Seeing small dirt or sand piles around cracks and crevices of your driveway or on walkways around your home? If you are, it is more than likely that you are experiencing pavement ant activity. In the Treasure Valley, particularly in the areas of Boise, Meridian, Nampa, and Caldwell, pavement ants are easy to detect and to identify. These ants are about 1/8 to 1/6 of an inch in length. They are blackish brown with paler legs and antennas. The queens from the colony are about 1/4 to 1/3 of an inch in length and are dark brown. These ants are usually seen outside your home on the ground around driveways and walkways. Sometimes you might see them clustering by the hundreds around sidewalks during your morning or evening walk. Also, when there is a problem outside of your home, you’ll see them foraging inside your kitchen and bathroom floors.
Inside your home, you’ll rarely see them climb onto kitchen counters or trail up walls. These ants typically enter homes in search of food -usually the sweet and greasy kind. The kind of food your children accidentally sprinkle around the kitchen after eating their favorite snack, or the kind that falls onto the floor after making your favorite sandwich. When food particles aren’t swept up from the floor, they know that your floor is the perfect place for them to get their favorite meal.
Pavement ants establish colonies under pavers, rocks, and under concrete slabs around your home, particularly under your driveway slab, including inside your garage. The entry to their colony can go undetected for quite a while when they are established inside garages, particularly in garages that are packed with personal belongings. Once established around a home, they forage all around for food sources to maintain the colony. You might consistently see them scattered all around foraging without knowing exactly where they are coming from.
Their diet consists of insects, moisture from nearby landscape, and food particles that accidentally drop on the floor. They love sweets and greasy foods. On occasions, if you have a problem with aphids on a tree or on landscape shrubs, these ants will feed from aphid droppings as it contains sap that these ants can’t keep away from.
Once these ants are established and left untreated for a while, they can cause a mess and serious damage to your driveway and walkways. As they enlarge their colonies, they burrow deeper and deeper into soil underneath concrete. They are great at mining and persistently pull-out dirt and sand from their tunnels one grain at a time. Over time, they create large voids under concrete slabs. These voids are later enlarged by erosion as water from rain and sprinklers funnels into their tunnels. These voids then cause concrete slabs or pavers to become uneven, sink, and eventually crack.
If you suspect a pavement ant infestation and can’t detect where they are coming from, give us a call here at Armis Pest Management and we will be glad to send one of our experienced technicians to inspect your home for free. We will then make the recommendations for an effective pest control treatment plan that will keep this ant under control.