BLACK CARPENTER ANTS

      One morning in spring, some years ago, I was walking through a soggy, bottomland woods near a creek in Lancaster County, Pa.  I noticed a pile of fine sawdust on the dead-leaf-covered ground under a dead limb of a tree,  Looking around, I noted a big black carpenter ant spitting sawdust out of a quarter-inch hole at my eye level in that dead bough.  Ant after ant took turns spitting sawdust out that hole as they chewed the dead wood in that branch to make tunnels and chambers for eggs, pupae and adults to live in there in relative safety.   

     I stopped to watch those busy ants for awhile.  And they were still working when I left their tree home.  Later, I became interested in the life history of carpenter ants in their dead wood niche in moist woods.

     Sterile, female worker ants are a little less than a half inch long, and black.  They create tunnels and galleries inside dead trees, stumps and fallen logs by chewing loose dead wood and throwing it out a hole in the dead wood.  The whole colony of workers, queen, males, eggs, larvae and pupae reside in those wooden cavities in protective, dead wood.  

     Carpenter ants, as a species, range from the Rocky Mountains east to the Atlantic Seaboard.  Each colony of them has thousands of related individuals.  Workers forage up to 100 yards, mostly at night, for dead insects and plant juices, all of which they locate with their sense of smell.  They leave a trail of pheromones so they can find their ways back to their nest, and lead other ants to food sources.  

     Carpenter ants also protect small insects called aphids, which ooze a sweet liquid as a waste product called honeydew.  Worker ants take drops of that liquid back to their nests in dead wood to feed to larvae and consume it themselves.  

     Queens, which are a little over a half-inch long, lay eggs all their lives.  And when a colony is a few years old and highly populated with worker ants, the queen lays eggs that become fertile male and female ants, with wings.  Those ants fly away, mate and the females start new colonies of workers.  

     Yellow-shafted flickers and other kinds of woodpeckers chip away dead wood to get to carpenter ants in their tunnels and chambers to ingest those insects.  But, perhaps, those ant colonies are not completely destroyed, and the queen builds up numbers of workers again.

     Black carpenter ants are interesting insects, as many species of insects are, unless they invade our homes.  Readers might see carpenter ant colonies in woods near your homes.       

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