The Carpenter Ant Family
This time, we have several different individuals of a single species. First, in April, we started occasionally seeing worker ants in and around the house, like this one:
This is pretty clearly a black carpenter ant, Camponotus pennsylvanicus. As ants go, these are pretty big, about 8 mm long. It is possible to get them to bite, say, the edge of your fingernail, but they don’t so much hurt as just hang on. Anyway, after seeing these for a while, this next one showed up on the kitchen floor, so I refrigerated her for photography:
She’s not dead in that second picture, just stunned from being refrigerated [1]. This is a young queen, who either hadn’t mated yet, or who had mated but hadn’t yet torn off her own wings. The main distinguishing feature between her and the workers (aside from the wings) is that she’s easily twice as long and considerably more massive.
This next one was on our front window, and I didn’t recognize it as an ant at the time [2]:
This is a male carpenter ant. These are a bit longer than the workers, but thinner, enough so that they don’t even look like the same species, even without considering the wings. I think that I’ve been seeing these around for years, but never even realized that they were ants before.
Now, ideally, I should have gone to find a carpenter ant nest, cut it open, and pulled out some larvae and cocoons to make this little family portrait complete. Probably the easiest way to find the nest would be to just follow one of the workers home, but I haven’t done this yet. This might be a good idea in any case, because these ants build their nests by tunneling in decaying wood. They don’t eat the wood the way termites do (they are more of a symptom of damage to wood in a house, not a cause), but they do increase the area of damage and let the wood rot faster. If there is a part of, say, our house that is in bad enough shape that they are nesting in it, it would probably be good to know about it. As far as the photography of the larvae goes, all ant larvae and cocoons look about the same aside from the size, so maybe it would be easier just to dig up one of the ant hills in the back yard when I take pictures of the next ant species.
[1] She recovered completely. I let her go outside, where she might have mated and established a nest, but it is much more likely that something ate her, which is what happens to the vast majority of new queen ants.
[2] I thought it was some sort of wasp. An understandable mistake, since ants and wasps are reasonably closely related, and there are many, many species of solitary wasp.
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