Ooh! You'd be a good person to ask this. One of my customers yesterday asked how to combat carpenter ants. I said call an exterminator, since those buggers can fly and ain't nothin gonna work against them except a pro. She'd been advised to get some cayenne pepper, but I looked askance at that because A)where are you going to sprinkle it? and B)how much are you going to need to do the trick? Aren't carpenter ants the kind of things that attack areas of houses way up high? How's some woman in her seventies gonna get up there?
Yeah, carpenter ants are real tough. People just want them out of their house because "ew! big black ants!" but they are usually a symptom of a larger problem: a water leak causing wood damage. Carpenter ants prefer to nest in wood damaged by water and fungi. So there are any number of products out there (read the label--most ant products exclude carpenter ants) but nothing I've found works really well. If it's a big problem, definitely hire a pro. A good one will find the nest and recommend a carpenter to fix your house. Cayenne pepper will be more dangerous for an old lady than it will be to ants. Heck, cayenne is more dangerous to handle than most of the pesticides I use.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 05:08 pm (UTC)