Apr 17, 2012 – The Queen Is Dead! Long Live the Other Queens
QUESTION:
I am using carpenter ant bait and they are feasting upon it. Will the Queen be dead in a few days? Will she be replaced? We have treated outside with Termidor and inside with the appropriate crack & crevice pressurized residual and liquid. If the Queen perishes will the colony collapse?
ANSWER:
While a carpenter ant colony has a single "primary" queen, there may be nearby satellite colonies that have established off the primary colony, and these satellite colonies will also be equipped with their own egg-laying queen ant. In a sense they are still part of the nearby parent colony. For this reason it is unlikely that the death of the original queen is going to spell doom for the entire colony. In addition, since all of the worker ants in an ant colony are females there will be many of them that are able to get their reproductive organs in working order and become secondary queens in that colony upon the death of the primary queen. Many species of ants will routinely have multiple queens, sometimes dozens of them, but carpenter ants are one kind that tends to stick with just one queen in a colony.
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I am using carpenter ant bait and they are feasting upon it. Will the Queen be dead in a few days? Will she be replaced? We have treated outside with Termidor and inside with the appropriate crack & crevice pressurized residual and liquid. If the Queen perishes will the colony collapse?
ANSWER:
While a carpenter ant colony has a single "primary" queen, there may be nearby satellite colonies that have established off the primary colony, and these satellite colonies will also be equipped with their own egg-laying queen ant. In a sense they are still part of the nearby parent colony. For this reason it is unlikely that the death of the original queen is going to spell doom for the entire colony. In addition, since all of the worker ants in an ant colony are females there will be many of them that are able to get their reproductive organs in working order and become secondary queens in that colony upon the death of the primary queen. Many species of ants will routinely have multiple queens, sometimes dozens of them, but carpenter ants are one kind that tends to stick with just one queen in a colony.
The hope with ant baits is that the bait is distributed to all members of the colony. The feeding by ants can be odd, in that the larvae are often used as the food supply. The larvae may eat the granular bait and then regurgitate some of it in a more liquid form that the worker ants then can swallow and digest. This food chain within the ant colony allows toxic baits to be passed around more thoroughly. With luck it is not just the Queen that gets a toxic dose but also all of the workers and larvae, and this definitely would lead to the collapse of the colony. Thankfully, carpenter ants do seem to be quite willing to accept granular insect baits, giving us a good tool for their control.
Just how long it will take to kill the queen is hard to say. Boric acid is one common active ingredient, and it appears to cause the death of insects by interrupting their ability to digest their food, thus leading to starvation of the insect. This could take awhile or it may happen quickly. Other active ingredients may work much more quickly, almost as fast as contact insecticides. The use of a good non-repellent with a great transfer effect such as fipronil adds to this overall arsenal on the ants.
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