Carpenter ant control in Long Beach: finding the damp wood the nest depends on

This is the single most useful thing a homeowner can learn about carpenter ants, and it often settles the question before we arrive. Drywood termite pellets are hard, uniform, six-sided grains, like tiny seeds, that roll between your fingers. They fall from small kick-out holes and pile in neat mounds. They are the color of the wood and sometimes darker.

Carpenter ant frass is completely different. It looks like coarse sawdust or shredded wood fibers, irregular in size, and it often contains bits of insect legs, wings and body parts, because the ants carry out their dead and the remains of prey. It feels soft and fibrous rather than gritty. If you find a small pile under a window or door frame, scoop some into a bag and look at it in good light; that alone usually tells you which insect you are dealing with.

• Termite pellets: hard, six-sided, uniform, roll when pushed
• Carpenter ant frass: soft, shredded, uneven, often mixed with insect parts
• Beetle frass: flour-fine powder, sometimes with tiny round pellets

Carpenter ants prefer wood with a moisture content well above that of dry framing, because softened wood is easier to tunnel. In a house, they settle where wood has been wet for a while: under a leaking window, behind a shower wall, around a roof valley that drips, at a deck ledger without flashing, or in a sill plate under a sprinkler-soaked wall.

Treating the ants without addressing the water usually means they or another wood pest come back to the same spot. The softened wood may also hold decay fungi or dampwood termites. When we find a carpenter ant nest, we report the moisture source and the condition of the wood so you can plan the repair along with the treatment.

Many carpenter ant colonies start outside, in the heart rot of an old tree, a stump left after a removal, a landscape timber, or the bottom of a firewood pile. From there, workers forage across the yard and into the house, and the colony may establish satellite nests in the structure. Treating only the indoor nest leaves the parent colony free to send more.

Look for ants climbing the trunks of mature trees at night, sawdust at the base of trees or stumps, and activity around woodpiles. Store firewood off the ground and away from the house, remove old stumps or have them ground out, and trim branches that touch the roof. If a large tree shows carpenter ant activity along with soft wood or cavities, an arborist should check its structure as well.

Carpenter ants are uncommon in the dense, paved parts of the city, but they do appear where old trees and damp wood come together. Bixby Knolls, Los Cerritos and Virginia Country Club have some of the oldest street and yard trees in Long Beach, and those mature trees, along with old stumps, are where most carpenter ant colonies we find begin. El Dorado Park Estates and the homes bordering El Dorado Park see occasional activity coming from the park edges and wooded areas.

Inside homes, the cases we see involve moisture. Raised-foundation homes in Belmont Heights and California Heights with long-running crawlspace leaks, homes in Naples with damp dock and deck framing, and Spanish Colonial homes with leaking window sills are typical. Because Pacific dampwood termites swarm around the same time and also live in wet wood, we always confirm which insect is present before treating.