Bellingham WA Home Inspection (King of the House): Carpenter Ants At Work

I did an inspection the other day and found something rather dramatic in the crawl space. If you look at the top photo, this fine sawdust or shavings (at the sill plate) is a condition that a competent structural pest inspector will be on the lookout for. That is the classic look of carpenter ant frass. These ants live in the wood and they do not eat it. They spit out the shavings, hence we see frass like this. Now, honestly, sometimes an inspector wonders how big a problem it really is, because he or she might not see any insects or any other damage. The problem is, the ants might be working at the other side of the house, and they are dumping the frass in yet another location. The next step, for the inspector, is to take a handful of the frass and look closely. The inspector needs to make sure it is not human made, like shavings from a drill. There was no doubt about this: Carpenter ant frass is fine shavings with tiny dark bug parts in it and that was the case here. The black spots in it are parts of bugs that were not so tasty, and also dead ants that expired and were jettisoned by the colony. Look at this top photo, this is a sign of carpenter ants, seen right after entering the crawl space. Here, you can also see some damage to the joist, which is more evidence of actual structural damage than what we often get to sift through. By the way, I can tell you that fine details, such as this joist damage, are way more obvious when the digital photos are reviewed than is the case when an inspector is down in the deep dark crawl space.

Now that you have seen the signs, I admit that the next photo was a surprise to me as well. I sounded the wood with my rock hammer and, soft and damaged as it was, it easily split apart. When I got the flashlight up in there, a few dozen carpenter ants came to life.These are of the species C Modoc -- the most common in the state, and they are really big ants. In this case, the colony had not only workers but it had winged reproductives -- a sign of what is called a mature colony. As the weather gets warmer, next year, these winged males and females will head off to try to start new colonies. Most of them will die. This is only a few of the ants that I saw, I enlarged the photo so you could see the ants working in the wood. As I stated above, these ants are not eating wood, they actually eat sweets and other bugs. They are in the wood because they are carpenters, building galleries to live in. This crawl space needs the services of a licensed pest control operator. But, the fact is, at this point enough damage has been done that portions of the wood need to be replaced as it is structurally weakened. Catching an infestation, in a timely manner, minimizes damage.

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