The 5 Types Of Ant To Watch Out For This Summer

7 min readAug 28, 2019

Who doesn’t love summer? Long days. Warm nights. Ice cream. There’s no end of good things to say about the season.

Unfortunately, humans aren’t the only ones who enjoy the warmer weather. Almost as soon as the sun begins to get stronger, the ants return. And for these small but troublesome creatures, there’s nothing more enjoyable than ruining your summer. In this guide i describe the 5 most common ant species. If you are looking to get rid of ants the natural way, you should read this guide about natural pest control.

With over 12,000 species currently known, ants are a difficult group to generalize about. But you’re never going to see the vast majority of those species. For most people, the only ants they encounter belong to one of a select few species and subspecies: fire ants, carpenter ants, odorous house ants, pavement ants, and Pharaoh ants.

So here’s some info on the five types of ants you’re most likely to encounter this summer. If you have ants in your garden or even inside your home, the chances are good that it’s one of these guys you’re dealing with.

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1. Fire Ants

Fire ants have a reputation which precedes them, and it’s not hard to see why. These are one of the few ant species in North America that are capable of hurting people.

Did you know ants are closely related to wasps? When you look at a creature like the fire ant, it starts to make sense. These ants have a venomous sting in their tail, just like their wasp cousins do. And they won’t hesitate to use this weapon in defense of their nest. Fire ants get their name from the burning sensation caused by this venom. If you do something fire ants don’t like, they’ll make sure you know about it. And because these bugs are so highly social, they tend to sting in groups. So if you get stung, you’ll get stung more than once.

Fire ants are reddish to dark brown and generally live outdoors, where they build large nests in the soil. It isn’t hard to tell when fire ants colonize your yard. You’ll see the mounds of dirt they raise above their colonies all over the place. These mounds can be 3 feet in diameter and up to 1 1/2 feet tall, so there’s nothing subtle about this species. Most efficient way to get rid of fire ants is using fire ant spray that kills the ants.

2. Carpenter Ants

Carpenter ants are the largest ant species in North America get their name from their habit of nesting in wood. And although in their natural habitat, these ants would usually be found in rotten logs and tree stumps, these creatures don’t need the wood to be rotten to make it their home. Their jaws are powerful enough to chew holes in solid wooden beams.

Winged Queens (not to be mistaken with wasps) and reproductive members of the colony can be up to one inch in length. Even a regular foraging worker can be more than half an inch, which is huge by ant standards. And because these bruisers aren’t great at foraging for food, they often wander a long way from the nest in search of something to eat.

Because of their habit of nesting in wood, these ants are one of the most important pest species in the US. Unlike termites, these ants don’t consume word, but they do hollow it out to build their nest. This can severely weaken structural beams in your home, and these ants are responsible for billions of dollars worth of damage every year.

Carpenter ants are responsible for billions of dollars worth of damage every year.

If you see some of these gargantuan ants wandering around your property, it’s not time to panic. However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep an eye on them and determine whether the ants you’ve seen were isolated wanderers or part of a more organized foraging effort. Because if you have a nest of these critters in your home, you need to take action right away. Before these ants literally eat you out of house and home.

3. Odorous House Ants

Odorous house ants also called little black ants are extremely common invaders of homes in the US. Ordinarily, they live outside, in soil or under leaf litter. Like many ant species, they are omnivorous, willing to eat just about anything they can find. But they do display a clear preference for sugar and other sweet items, which has led to them sometimes being called sugar ants.

It’s this love of sugar that brings these ants into conflict with humans. Outdoors, these ants feed on honeydew, the sweet secretion of aphids. They are also partial to fruits, nuts, seeds, and occasional protein sources such as other insects. But the average human house represents an opportunity these creatures can’t pass up. The smallest soda spill or puddle of melted ice cream represents a bonanza for a sugar feeding ant. And it’s because these ants come inside so often that they’ve earned the ‘house’ part of their name.

So what about the odorous part? Well, when crushed, these ants have been found to give off an unpleasant smell. It’s been compared to the smell of rotten coconuts. So if you’re wondering about the identity of the little black ants you’re finding in your kitchen, give one of them a sniff. People might think you’re weird, but just tell them it’s for science.

4. Pavement Ants

Pavement ants are another extremely common ant species that can often be found outdoors. As the name implies, these ants love to create nests in sandy soil underneath sidewalks and paving slabs. The mounds of sandy soil that the ants push out near the entrances and exits of their nests usually give away the presence of the colony below.

These small ants aren’t incapable of hurting humans. However, they are very aggressive and often go to war with one another to defend their territory. You may have seen these pitched ant battles raging on the sidewalk in summer.

As long as this species stays outdoors, it’s generally not too much of a problem. After all, in nature, everything has its place. Like other species, pavement ants feed on honeydew but also prey on other insects, and this helps to keep the population of bugs down.

However, these critters are not above taking advantage of an easy meal. And they have as much of a sweet tooth as any other ant species. As a result, they will often come indoors in search of sweet things to eat.

It’s also possible for these ants to wind up inside homes through cracks in the concrete foundation. As ant colonies grow throughout the summer, they expand into new territory. If there’s a crack in the foundations of your home, these ants may end up coming inside and ruining your day.

5. Pharaoh Ants

Pharaoh ants are exotic ants are nevertheless worryingly common. Not native to the US, they are thought to originate in the tropical regions of Africa. Most of the US is too cold for this species to live outdoors, although there are some outdoor populations in South Florida. More commonly, Pharaoh ants live entirely indoors, where the warmth of human homes keeps them active all year round.

These ants are tiny, at around 0.07 of an inch long. In fact, they are so small that many people don’t even realize that they are ants at all. What they lack in size, they make up for in the nuisance they cause.

Unlike many other species, Pharaoh ants have multiple reproductive queens in their nest. To get rid of nests with Pharao ants you can use Pharaoh Ant Bait Products. New nests are created when a queen decides to leave, taking some of the worker ants with her and setting up a new colony in greener pastures. But often, Pharaoh ants also perform this process, known as budding, when the colony feels stressed. Attempts to spray these ants with pesticide or even household cleaners will stress the colony and cause budding. So instead of having a single ant nest, you could quickly have a handful of them spread throughout the building.

For this reason, it’s essential that you never spray anything on Pharaoh ants. The only way to deal with this pesky critter is by using a slow-acting poison bait which the ants will carry back to the nest and feed to their multiple queens.