I went hunting in a crawl space the other day and made a rather dramatic find. If you look at the top photo, this is evidence that a competent structural pest inspector will be on the lookout for. That is classic carpenter ant frass. Look above the sill plate. Now, honestly, sometimes an inspector wonders how big a problem such frass is, when no other damage is seen. Often the ants are working at one end of the crawl space and dumping the frass in another location. The next step, for the inspector, is to take a handful of it and look closely. The inspector needs to make sure it is not a result of past human activity, such as shavings from a hole that was drilled. There was no doubt about this. Carpenter ant frass is fine shavings with tiny dark bug parts in it. The bug parts are pieces of bugs that the ants discarded because they were not tasty and also there will be dead ants who expired on the job and were jettisoned by the colony. So, look at this top photo, and then I will show more of what I found in the photo below. You will see some damage to the joist here, which is more evidence of damage than what we often get to sift through in a dark crawl space. Even with a good flashlight, damage is always more obvious in the digital photos. That is, in my view, a serious problem with all "on the spot" inspection reports. Sometimes the severity of a problem becomes much more obvious as the inspector later reviews photos.

Now that you have seen the clues, the next photo tells it all. I sounded the joist with my rock hammer and, soft and damaged as it was, it easily split apart. When I got the flashlight up in there, a few dozen carpenter ants came to life.These are of the species C Modoc -- the most common in the state, and they are really big ants. In this case, the colony had not only workers but it had winged reproductives -- a sign of what is called a mature colony. As the weather gets warmer, these winged males and females will head off to try to start new colonies. Most of them will die. Remember, these pests are not eating wood, they actually eat sweets and other bugs. They are in the wood because they are carpenters, building galleries to live in. Treatment by a pest control operator is required here but, by this point, enough damage has been done that portions of the wood will have to be replaced as it is structurally weakened. If an infestation is caught early on, most of the damage can be prevented.

Thanks for dropping by.

Steven L. Smith

www.kingofthehouse.com