Ants, spiders and termites are the most common bugs in Canada and can tell you a lot about your house, none of it good. Ants — particularly carpenter ants — can get into your home through even the tiniest of cracks.
They will follow a trail of food or even drips from a popsicle into your house and then leave an invisible chemical trail known as pheromones for others to follow.
Ants can nest almost anywhere in and around your house including in lawns, walls and stumps. An average sized colony can contain up to 500,000 of them. Worse, worker ants can live for seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.
The presence of ants may also be a warning sign that your home has rotten wood. The relatively harmless carpenter ant lives both outdoors and indoors in moist, decaying or hollow wood. They are among the largest ants, from one-quarter to three-eighths of an inch long and usually black, but some have reddish or yellowish coloration.
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They cut galleries into the wood grain to provide passageways and leave sawdust behind.
They do not eat wood, but will take advantage of soft wood to hide in and build their nests.
So if you see carpenter ants, it means you usually have rotting wood somewhere since they can only chew wet, soft wood. Find their colony and repair the damaged and rotten wood before it leads to further damage.
Most people hate spiders, but they're harmless. But if you have them, or mealy bugs and silverfish in your house or basement it can mean potential trouble. It's what attracts them to your house that you should be concerned about — and that is moisture where it shouldn't be, like under a basement sub-floor or on foundation walls. Moisture is a magnet to these things. They usually surface in bathrooms where moisture is commonplace, but they are in the house in the first place because an endemic moisture problem exists.
The answer is an experienced building contractor who will know how to find the source of the moisture and how to best repair it. This is not the time to rely on consumer sprays and poisons. They may reduce the infestation, but they won't eliminate the problem of moisture, and the bugs will come back.
Termites are another issue entirely, since their presence is an omen of serious damage in your home. Unlike carpenter ants, termites eat wood for food. They require moisture from soil and soft rotten wood and can tunnel hundreds of feet to find new sources of food, like the wood in your house.
They feed on cellulose-based material, including wood, books, boxes, furniture and drywall. Termite colonies work 24 hours a day, and infestations can go undiscovered until serious damage is done.
Because they feed hidden from view, there are few signs of their presence. The obvious clues are discarded wings, wood that sounds hollow when tapped, cracked or bubbling paint and termite droppings that look like sawdust.
Your best bet is to call a professional pest inspector/contractor. Finding the location and extent of termites in the house is something of an art. Inspectors use a combination of probing, tapping, listening, and looking. Some may use fibre optic scopes that can peer inside a wall.
After finding an insect infestation, a good inspector will recommend one or more options for eradicating the bugs, and discuss the pros and cons of each with you.
Your contractor's first line of defence against bugs in your house should be to block access routes and seal the house. Armed with a caulking gun, he will seal up cracks and crannies where bugs might enter, including openings around pipes and heating ducts.
Mike Holmes is the host of Holmes on Homes on HGTV. E-mail Mike at mikeholmes@holmesonhomes.com or go to www.holmesonhomes.com.
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