What’s Your Type?

Operating in nine states with varying ant pressure and species in each geography, Massey Services sees tawny crazy ants in the West, along with some white-footed and big-headed ants. Outdoors, fire ants are commonplace in warmer regions. Odorous house ants and Argentine ants are the most popular houseguests across the board, said Tom Jarzynka, vice president of technical and training, Massey Services, Orlando, Fla.

The top five ant invaders based on PCT’s 2024 State of the Ant Control Market are odorous house, carpenter, little black, Argentine and fire ants. Twenty-eight percent of respondents cited odorous house ants as the most common type. Otherwise, species prevalence is highly regional.

ROLE CALL. Jason Dimick won’t go long before the phone rings for pavement ants in the Eugene, Ore., market. “With the sandy soil here, they move quickly and come up through any crack in a foundation or slab they can find,” said the owner of PAH Weed and Pest.

Carpenter ants frequently settle into damp timber, which is all over the place and not just on and in homes. “Sugar ants are huge here,” Dimick said. “Once they are embedded, it takes some pretty aggressive control to get to the bottom of it.” He offered a colleague’s experience: “He wanted to see how far down the nest was, and he dug down about 25 feet before finding it.”

Jay Strassner of Allswell Here in San Diego, Calif., finds nocturnal rover ants, which he calls “the trickiest ants,” because of their night moves, along with thief ants and harvester ants in rural areas. Because his routes shift from downtown to agricultural areas, “our treatments change depending on the property,” he said.

Outdoors, fire ants are a struggle in the South and West. Howard Hatzfeld’s Spring Branch, Texas-based business, Hill Country Pest Solutions, sees its fair share. “Most of the time, I wait until after a rain and they start pushing up their little mounds of dirt,” he said of early identification.

Velvety tree ants in Idyllwild, Calif., are often confused with carpenter ants, said Jeff Litten, owner, Acorn Pest Control in Hemet, Calif.

But the velvet ants really bite.

“I’ve seen people and animals all bit up,” Litten said, noting that their “leave-behind” is a talcum powder-like fine dust versus the carpenter ants’ sawdust. After eggs are laid in April and May, velvety tree ants, which like roosting on the top beams of the region’s A-frame homes, begin trailing to move back outside to trees. “They are all over the windows,” he said, citing non-repellent insecticides as his go-to control method.

Come early spring with its consistently warm temperatures, Lance Griggs, Spectrum Pest Management, said Argentine and odorous house ants — the most common structural pests in his Madison, Ala., region — will double and triple trail their way along brush-covered perimeters, entering through cracks and eaves, and from underneath slab foundations.

Griggs recalled a particularly messy bathroom infestation with “thousands of ants” that were entering from the plumbing supply line at the base of a pedestal sink. With a lot of slab buildings in his neck of the woods, pavement ants also move through soil and journey into homes, he said.

SUPER DUTY. Nearly half of PMPs surveyed observed elevated ant pressure, and 52 percent said invasive ants are a growing problem. “We are seeing an expansion of invasive species, and with the world as small as it is these days, we will continue to see that,” Jarzynka said, calling species like the tawny crazy ant “the bed bugs of 10 years ago.”

“As time passes, we figure out how to control [super colonies], we learn their behavior, biology and adopt strategies to manage them,” he said.

Jarzynka described a big-headed ant colony invading a 6-acre area where a homeowner’s property bordered a powerline easement. The client’s backyard was overdue for “doggy duty,” which attracted the super-colony insects to her home.

Placing residual barriers away from buildings to restrict foraging and the use of insect growth regulators (IGRs) with bait has shown real promise, Jarzynka said, relating that “there is no one-size fits all approach.”

Howard Hatzfeld said he only dealt with thief ants and Pharaoh ants once in his Spring Branch, Texas, region, where he operates Hill Country Pest Solutions. He had a couple of interactions with tawny crazy ants while working with a different company. “I had never seen anything like it before,” he said of the ants crowding driveway cracks, hugging the house perimeter and treating crevices like a six-lane highway.

After treatment, he advised the client to use a leaf blower to blow off the corpses so the emerging ants would be exposed to the product. “Otherwise, they travel over the dead soldiers, and you end up with a retreat,” Hatzfeld said.

Was the super-colony strategy successful? “I never heard back from him,” Hatzfeld said, considering that an affirmative.