Real ones:



We've got ants (with and without wings, apparently) wandering in through a gap in the bathroom window and heading for a crack somewhere on top of the shower tiles. The only ant poison I've got handy is for fire ants, but it's better than nothing, I suppose. I laid that out above the window sill, where I guess they're coming in. Anyone here have more particular advice about dealing with my uninvited houseguests? If these ants are nesting inside the house, do I need to do something more intense than just ant poison to ensure they don't keep coming back?

I have no idea what to tell you about your problem, but thought I'd just pipe up to say that the pictures are cool...

If you vacuum live ants be sure to dump the bag right away.

You need to get yourself some Terro ant poison. This stuff works like a charm and is great fun to use.

You put a quarter-sized blob of this stuff on some foil or wax paper and prod at an ant until he starts to drink it. He'll drink that yummy stuff until he's about twice his normal size. Afterwards, he goes back to the nest and tells all his buddies about the gourmet feast. After a couple of hours, you'll have a trail of hundreds of ants going to the blob. I usually put out a couple more blobs because there will be so many ants drinking at the first one that others can't join in.

No more ant problem.

Jim

Are they streaming in a nice little line? Maybe there's a food source you need to eliminate, along with eliminating the hole.

Whenever I have bug problems (quite often), eliminating whatever food source they're after makes them go away. Of course, they may be going into my walls, harmfully out of sight. But they're away.

I've got some serious insect problems.......

Definitely the nice line that traces from window to shower. What's unclear is whether the food is outside and the nest is inside, or vice versa. There *shouldn't* be food inside the walls, unless the walls themselves are food. So far as I can tell, I'm looking at ants, not termites, right?

There are carpenter ants that can also damage wood. I'm not sure what the different kind of ants look like but you could take one to a company that deals with bugs and find out.

Google is helpful- try this:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/15740

This image from termite-i makes me feel much better:



From that diagram, I'm confident that I'm at least dealing with ants and not termites.

They look like carpenter ants to me. Nearly as bad as termites. Call an exterminator before they destroy more of your house.

Carpenter ants are bigger than these. Also, there are some nice web pages (like this one at UMN) that seem to indicate that I'm not looking at carpenter ants.

Nonetheless, given that they're swarming into my shower, it's almost certainly the case that moisture from the shower is getting into the wood behind the shower and they're nesting back there (ant larvae apparently like moisture). The cheap answer is to get an exterminator to pipe poisonous dust into the wall. The expensive answer is to tear out and rebuild the shower.

Use the Terro. It works.

For immediate relief I've found that the EXPO brand of white board spray cleaner makes an excellent insecticide. Dose away with the chemical trails as well.

another referrence-
This Is True featured http://www.whatsthatbug.com/ as a 'bonzer website' (a good thing) this week.
Thought I'd add it to support the empeg knowledge base.