The Rundown On Flying Ants

Author: Michele Walls

Many people see flying ants in their homes and assume that they have been infested with termites. In reality, these flying insects are nothing like termites. They do not eat wood or cause the same types of damage. However, they may be damaging at some point, once they have started a colony in your home. This can be prevented, provide you determine that flying ants are the real problem, and that you do not have a termite infestation instead.

To figure out if you have termites or flying ants, you should essentially take a close look at them. Flying ants have bodies that are shaped differently than termites. In general, termites tend to be long and straight; ants on the other hand have segmented bodies, and might look more irregularly shaped. Their wings are also different; flying ants have wings that are shorter and fold back, while termites have large, flaky wings that tend to fall off easily. For this reason, you'll find more wings around the site of a termite infestation than you will around an ant one.

Another giveaway to flying ants is their color. Ants range from red to brown to black, while termites are typically only black and don't have this variety of colors. They also are easy to determine by their destructive habits. Termites will destroy wood and eat into it; flying ants won't usually cause a lot of damage until they have alerted the colony to the site they have taken up residence in.

Once you have determined whether or not you have a problem with ants, you might want to look into treatments to get rid of them. There are both chemical treatments, which are deadly, or non-deadly treatments to the ants, such as repellents. Ant repellents are not too expensive and are usually effective at getting rid of the ants, whether they are inside or outside your house. However, if you have a serious problem with flying ants, you might have to consider insecticides and pest control in order to get rid of them for good. If not, basic repellents work well - in fact, dish detergent is one thing you can use to kill or drive off ants without needing to buy any pesticide for. Just make sure to keep kids and pets away from the site where you are applying these pesticides, so that no humans are harmed in the process of ant removal.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/bath-showers-articles/the-rundown-on-flying-ants-3584356.html

About the Author
Stewart Wrighter recently studied cost effective methods of dealing with carpenter ants and searched for organic carpenter ant treatments to solve his problem. He discovered many remedies available to manage the pest control issue.