Ant Control in Glen Cove

Why does one city produce three unrelated ant jobs?

Because a carpenter ant is a wood insect, and fewer than half the dwellings here are wood-framed detached houses.

That is the fact that organizes this page. Of roughly 11,462 housing units in Glen Cove, only 48.8 per cent are detached single-family houses. Two-family houses account for about 1,513 units on their own. Another 990 sit in three- and four-unit buildings, 820 in blocks of twenty to forty-nine, and 1,461 in buildings of fifty or more. Some 2,155 units, 18.8 per cent, were standing before 1940, and 1,152 have been added since 2010.

An insect that needs softened structural timber and an insect that needs a warm crevice with a food route are not the same customer, and this city has habitat for both in quantity. So the work divides.

The pre-1940 detached core and the estate fringe is classic carpenter ant country. Old frame houses with porches, deep window casings and applied trim, standing on steep ground under mature canopy at the edge of Welwyn, Morgan Park and the surviving estate grounds. Here the ant is a report on the building and the job is a moisture investigation.

The two-family and small multifamily stock is the same insect in a different ownership structure. The wet wood is in a shared building, the person who notices the frass is frequently not the person who owns the gutter above it, and the treatment and the repair are two different conversations with two different people.

The rebuilt waterfront is a third thing entirely. New, tight, mechanically ventilated buildings on remediated ground, with planted terraces, podium beds and irrigated amenity landscaping. Very little wet structural timber, and a good deal of warm damp soil sitting directly against a building. Those are trailing ants, not excavators.

The species and the way its colonies are put together are covered on the carpenter ant profile; the treatment logic sits under ant control. This page is about the buildings.

What is a carpenter ant actually finding in an old Glen Cove house?

A porch, most of the time, and after that a window head on the elevation the weather hits.

Carpenter ants do not eat wood. They cut galleries into it for nest space and carry the spoil out, and because cutting sound timber is expensive work they choose material that decay has already softened. The Northeastern IPM Center puts the requirement plainly: rotted timber costs a colony much less effort to hollow out, and the water still in it is what keeps the brood alive. It also names the site most often taken: the entry framing around a window or a door that has gone damp.

On the older detached stock here that description keeps landing on the same assemblies.

The porch. A covered porch is a low-pitch roof tied into a wall, carried on posts bearing on a deck or a pier, with a beam, a soffit and a floor structure under it. Every one of those presents an upward-facing surface with a joint at its head, and the whole assembly sits outside the heated envelope, so it never gets the drying interior framing gets. Where the flashing at the porch roof-to-wall junction has been painted over four times, water goes into the band joist and the wall plate immediately inside. Where the porch floor pitches back toward the house instead of away, the beam beneath it stays wet permanently.

The window head on the weather elevation. Water driven at a wall runs down the face, reaches the head casing, and either sheds or sits. On a house of this age the drip cap has usually corroded, been removed during a paint cycle, or was never installed. The framing that wets is the header and the sheathing above the opening, which is exactly the void a satellite colony wants — enclosed, dark and no longer drying.

The sill line behind planting. A century of gardening raises the bed. Where soil has climbed above the top of the foundation the sill sits permanently damp with no capillary break, and the shrub in front of it stops the wall drying and hides the whole line from view.

Then the relief does something specific here. The ground is not level anywhere for long: the city averages about forty-five feet and runs from the shoreline up to a hundred and seventy-five, with the steepest slopes and bluffs concentrated along Hempstead Harbor, along Glen Cove Creek and around Garvies Point. A building on that kind of relief does not get wet evenly. The water arrives at one elevation, from uphill, with momentum behind it, and it goes on arriving there until somebody changes the grading. Surveys here come back lopsided far more often than not, and the colony is on the loaded side.

The estate fringe adds the other half of the equation. Welwyn is two hundred and four acres, Morgan Memorial Park forty; the Braes, Winfield Hall and Killenworth carry mature grounds of their own. Closed canopy over a north or east elevation means a wall that would shed a rainstorm in an afternoon on an open lot can take most of a week to dry out. And that same ground supplies the parent colony: a stump, a wound in an old specimen tree, a dead limb still up in the crown, a timber retaining structure at grade. Foraging runs to several hundred feet, so a house on the estate edge is well inside the radius of timber it does not own.

Why does a two-family house make an ant problem harder than a bigger building does?

Because the authority is divided but the structure is not, and nobody involved thinks of the building as one object.

The two-family house is the characteristic non-detached form here — about 1,513 units of it. The typical example is a frame house divided at some point in its life, or built as two dwellings from the start, with one household above the other.

Now put a carpenter ant colony into that. The wet framing is generally at the roof edge, a porch, a gutter line or a sill — all of which belong to the owner. The evidence, though, appears wherever the ants forage, and that is usually a kitchen or a bathroom. So the person who sees the trail may be a tenant on the upper floor while the fault is a leader discharging at the corner of a yard they do not use. The tenant reports ants. A treatment happens in the flat. The trail stops. Nothing has changed about the gutter.

The other half is the structure. The two dwellings share a stair, a flue, a riser and four decades of added cabling, and every one of those passes through a floor that was never closed behind it. Satellite nests do not respect the division of the building any more than the water does, and a colony working from a wet rim joist can put brood in a void serving both dwellings.

The city gives you one useful mechanism here. An owner letting a one- or two-family dwelling here has thirty days to register it with the city, unless they or an immediate family member genuinely live at the premises, and the registration has to name an agent for service of process and carry floor plans. On a registered rental there is therefore a named person to send a moisture finding to, which is exactly what is usually missing when treatment on a small rental property fails repeatedly. Where the building is managed rather than owner-run, the framework is at property management pest control, and boards will find theirs at co-op and condo pest control.

The practical instruction for an occupant is short. Photograph where the trail enters the room rather than where it is going. Note the date, the time of day and whether it followed rain. Tape a few insects to a card, because identification decides the method and a photograph of a moving line rarely settles it. Then put it in writing to the person who owns the roof.

What lives in the downtown commercial fabric?

Whatever the cellar is doing, which on Glen Street is usually damp.

A working downtown of nineteenth and early twentieth century commercial buildings has a particular vertical arrangement: trade at street level, storage or a boiler below, dwellings above, and a stair, chase and riser tying all three together through floors that were built before anyone thought about closing them. It also has the city’s densest concentration of food handling, which supplies the sugar and protein foragers are actually after.

Carpenter ants turn up in that fabric where the building is wet, and on a masonry commercial building that generally means one of three places: the roof edge and parapet framing, where a coping joint or a roof-edge detail has been admitting water for years; the joist ends pocketed into a masonry wall, which is where a timber floor structure meets damp masonry with no air space; and the rear elevation, where a service yard, a stair, an old shed roof and a stack of accumulated additions produce a wall that drains badly.

Small ants are the more frequent complaint, and their route is the chase. A trail crossing a counter in an apartment above a shop has come up from somewhere lower, and the somewhere is usually the cellar or the gap around a supply line. The reason it matters that they are downtown rather than in a house is that a food-handling ground floor turns an ant trail into a compliance question as well as a nuisance one — that side of the work runs through restaurant pest control and the wider commercial program.

Pavement ants are common at street and cellar level here, coming up through joints in a slab or a crack in a cellar floor — see the pavement ant profile.

Odorous house ants move indoors when their shallow outdoor sites saturate, and on steep ground that happens fast because runoff arrives in volume from uphill. See the odorous house ant profile. The one thing not to do is spray the trail: a colony under pressure buds, and one problem becomes three.

Pharaoh ants are the species to be careful about in any continuously heated multi-unit building, and this city has plenty. They cannot survive a New York winter outdoors, so a colony that is present lives permanently indoors, and repellent treatment fragments it. The pharaoh ant profile explains why identification comes first.

What changes on the rebuilt waterfront?

The habitat moves out of the building and into the landscaping.

Garvies Point carries over a thousand LEED-certified housing units and seventy-five thousand square feet of commercial space on ground that was industrial for most of the twentieth century, together with a marina, public shoreline and a ferry terminal that opened in 2016. The buildings are tight. Continuous air sealing, modern flashing details and mechanical ventilation mean the classic entry points are largely absent, and there is very little structural timber sitting at an elevated moisture content anywhere in them.

What there is instead is soil on structure. Terraces, podium planting beds, courtyard landscaping, street trees in vaults, planters against walls, and irrigation running to all of it on a controller. That is warm, protected, reliably moist bedding immediately against a building, which is a good nest site for exactly the species that do not need wood. Pavement ants work the joints in the hard landscaping; odorous house ants work the mulch and the planter volume and move indoors when a zone overwaters or a storm saturates the bed.

Carpenter ants do appear on this kind of construction, and when they do it is worth taking seriously rather than treating routinely, because on a building of this age they are reporting a defect rather than an accumulation of neglect. The candidates are a terrace assembly leaking into the framing or blocking below it, a planter with a failed liner sitting against a wall, timber decking and its sleepers over a podium, and any landscape structure — a pergola, a bench, a screen — built in timber at grade.

The other thing new waterfront construction changes is what may be done to the ground. From 1942 to 1985 metals were processed at the twenty-six-acre Li Tungsten facility on Garvies Point Road along Glen Cove Creek; EPA listed the site in 1992, completed the cleanup in 2008 and imposed land use restrictions, and sixty-eight of the two hundred and fourteen acres in the redevelopment area lie inside state and federal Superfund ground. The corrective half of an ant job is frequently drainage — extending a leader, cutting a swale, correcting a grade line, trenching for a leader line. On those parcels the restrictions have to be established before a spade goes in. That is a matter of doing the work lawfully rather than a reason to avoid it, but it is a real constraint and it belongs in the scope rather than in a surprise on the day.

How do you tell whether the insect is a carpenter ant or a termite?

By the waist, the wings and what the workings are full of — and it is worth settling before anyone is called out.

Hold the specimen sideways against something pale. If it reads as two objects joined by a thread, with a bend halfway along each antenna, it is an ant, and its front wings will be the longer pair. If it reads as one continuous shape, its antennae a straight row of small beads and its four wings indistinguishable from one another, it is a termite. Wings alone are enough: four of one size is the termite, a mismatched set is the ant.

The building evidence separates them further. Carpenter ants keep their galleries clean. University of New Hampshire Extension sets the smooth, empty ant workings against termite galleries that are packed out with a mud-like deposit, and the spoil an ant colony would otherwise be sitting on gets pushed out and dropped below the opening. Subterranean termites do the reverse: they bring soil into the structure, in shelter tubes on the foundation and in the workings themselves. Stringy spoil below a joint means ants. Soil in the tunnel means termites. The whole comparison, with the swarm calendars and the way each kind of damaged wood reads when it is opened, is set out on the eastern subterranean termite page.

Then the plain part. Graduate does not treat termites. That is a settled position rather than a temporary one and there is no reduced version of it — not an inspection, not a partial scope, not a piece of somebody else’s job. If what you have found is a termite, you need a contractor who does that work for a living, and the evidence you have already collected is what they will want on the first call.

If it is a carpenter ant, this is the right page.

The conditions on the harbor and creek slopes do favor the other insect, and it is honest to say so on a page like this. Steep slopes, a water table that sits close to the surface near the shore, and a hundred years of soil piled against old foundations have shut the gap between earth and timber that Cornell Cooperative Extension asks for on a great many buildings down there. That describes the ground rather than anything we sell. What the same conditions produce for us is softened framing at the sill and the porch, and that is the work described above.

How is the nest actually located?

By narrowing rather than searching, in a fixed order.

Spoil first. Because it is expelled through a slit and drops, a heap of coarse pale material on a cellar floor, on the flat of a porch beam, on a windowsill or along the top of a baseboard points straight up at the gallery that produced it. Fresh spoil is pale and loose; an older deposit grays off and compacts. A pile that reappears within days of being swept means the gallery is being enlarged now. One that does not may be historic, and establishing that before a wall is opened is worth the wait.

Then sound and moisture. A tool handle along a beam, a rim, a porch post or a window casing changes note where the wood behind has been hollowed, and an awl finds where the soft zone starts and stops. On a masonry building the joist pocket is worth sounding specifically, because the loss there is invisible from the room. A meter over the same framing is faster than either, since the whole distribution follows water and painted trim can look perfect and read saturated.

Then traffic, after dark. These insects forage at night. A flashlight at ten in the evening along a porch beam, a fascia line, the base of a downspout and the trunk of any mature tree within fifty feet shows routes that are invisible at midday, and following one outward on the estate fringe regularly ends at a tree rather than at the house.

Then the void, before it is treated. Where evidence points into a cavity, a small inspection opening and a borescope establishes whether anything is in it. On a two-family or a downtown building that also settles the question of whose side of the structure the nest is on, which decides who commissions the repair.

Which corrections come first on falling ground?

The water, in an order set by the relief.

Where the runoff arrives. On steep ground the first question is what is uphill. A neighboring driveway, a stepped garden, a retaining wall with no drainage behind it, a street that sheds toward a rear boundary — all of them deliver water to one elevation of the building. Correcting that may mean a swale, a regrade or a drain, and it may be the only item that matters.

The leaders. Extended well clear of the wall, into something with fall. On a slope a leader discharging at a corner is not a puddle; it is a subsurface flow along the footing.

The porch. Re-flash the roof-to-wall junction properly rather than sealing it. Correct the pitch of the floor so it sheds away. Get air under the structure. On this stock this is the single highest-value repair on the property.

The gutter and the roof edge. Cleared, proven with a hose rather than a look, and repaired at the joints. A gutter that has been overflowing at the same corner for six years has been building the nest site the whole time.

The grade and the planting. Soil taken back down off the sill, and enough clearance between shrub and wall that air reaches the bottom of it and somebody can actually look at it.

Then replace what has lost section. A soft sill horn, a porch beam that gives under an awl, a rotted window header. Treatment finishes a colony; it does nothing for the member, and a member that has lost section stays worth moving into.

Then treat the colony rather than the trail. Bait on a live route gets carried home; material put into a gallery whose position is known reaches the brood. A band sprayed along a visible line takes out the workers standing on it and nothing else.

Where the closing half of that scope is substantial, it is specified as structural exclusion in Glen Cove, because the sills, penetrations and roof-edge details that admit water are the same ones that admit everything larger — which is also why the rodent control findings usually turn up in the same report.

When does the ant year turn in a city on a harbor?

In four phases, with one exception that belongs to the multifamily stock.

March to May. Activity resumes. Indoor sightings ahead of anything happening outdoors mean a nest inside the heated envelope, and in a two-family or an apartment building that finding is available all year rather than seasonally, which is worth remembering before it gets dismissed. Winged reproductives appear in the same weeks and get reported as termites.

June to August. Peak foraging and maximum spoil, so the best window for locating a nest. It is also the only honest test of a moisture finding, because framing that still reads damp in a dry August week has a supply. Odorous house ants surge after each heavy storm as runoff floods their shallow sites.

September to October. Foraging tails off and satellites consolidate. This is the repair window: porch, flashing, gutter, grade and drainage work goes in while the weather still holds, and the autumn storms audit it before the winter does.

November to February. In a detached house the colony shuts down, so a silent January proves nothing and March is when you find out. In a continuously heated apartment building there is no lull at all, and a January complaint from a fifty-unit block is not an anomaly — it is what an indoor species does in a building that never gets cold.

For what else this city’s housing generates across every service, see pest control in Glen Cove. Immediately east, Locust Valley runs the opposite housing profile — over ninety per cent detached, on estate ground. Sea Cliff sits on the bluff at the other side of the harbor mouth with a much older stock, and Roslyn holds the head of the same harbor. The wider Nassau and Suffolk program sits on the Long Island hub.

If there is spoil under a porch beam or a trail crossing a kitchen in a building you do not own, tell us what you have found and where, and say which floor it is on.

Related

• Ant Control — how we approach it
• All pest control in Glen Cove
• Rodent Control in Glen Cove
• Structural Exclusion in Glen Cove