Help identifying an ant

El Mucho

We have a lot of ant hills around our house and they all look like regular old black ants. However, I saw a much larger ant crawling around and I immediately started worrying he may be a carpenter ant. If someone in the know could assuage my fears that would be great.

EDIT:

Our property sits adjacent to a city park and there are wooden posts with chain between marking the park border. I took a couple pictures of one of the rotten posts, this looks suspiciously like a carpenter ant nest, right?

ceres

Looks like one to me, my mom had those in a tree outside our house. They tended to get inside a lot, and they are huge.

Blameless Cleric

looks like a job for.... @Arch

also from my limited ant experience, looks like one to me too

Arch

Hmmm. Not sure. It could be a carpenter ant, but it's hard to tell.

If you're worried about damage in your house or something, the better thing to look for is evidence of their activity, such as piles of sawdust as seen below



Check out this site for a good breakdown.


http://extensionpublications.unl.edu/assets/html/g1738/build/g1738.htm

Arch

Also those posts do look like carpenter nests....

El Mucho

I haven't noticed anything in the house but that post is like 6 feet from the south wall of my house. Incidentally, the grass and soil along the southside of our house had a large ant colony that I only recently got rid of. A local pest control company recommended we use this stuff.

Will this be adequate for carpenter ants? I didn't notice a lot of activity in the posts when I looked seemed kind of quiet.

Arch

Yeah, I mean that's standard ant control fare. Pyrethrin dust, low concentration, allows them to distribute to the rest of the colony. Should be okay.

El Mucho

So I called the city and they told they will inform the people at Public Works, who should come and take a look. Hopefully, they pull all the rotten posts so there is nothing nearby for a new nest to form in.

Thanks for the help everyone.