Saw them for the first time today in the bathroom where the light shines on the counter, and in my office on a curtain in bright light. (It’s still before dawn here.) Never saw them before. Not seeing them (yet) in any other part of the house. Had a new roof put on this past week-- could that have stirred things up in the attic? It’s been in the 90s+ here and yesterday we had a bit of rain. There aren’t zillions of them flying around or anything. Just the few I’ve taken pictures of.
Are these termites? Or flying ants? Looking at google pics isn’t clarifying for me.
BUGS1 BUGS2 Paper clip (and cat hair) is for scale.
They look like flying ants, but it’s hard to tell. At my work, we walked in one morning (recently) to find thousands of them swarming around. We did our best to kill them and got Orkin en route, but we thought we were going to have to open late that day, they were just that bad.
By the time Orkin got there about an hour later they were gone. He looked at some of the dead ones and said they were likely just flying ants. According to him, they’ll swarm up out of their nest in search of one thing, finding a new home. They won’t bother people or food, start a new nest/colony (I assume mating is in there somewhere) and they’ll die off quickly (within hours). According to him, it’s typically a one time thing (though it happened twice for us). He also managed to find where they were coming from. Right out of the concrete. There’s literally an ant hill made out of concrete dust, which I still need to seal up.
ETA, flying ants do like the light. In fact, one of the ways he identified them was because they showed up at night, but the evidence point towards them swarming near light sources. He said it’s very common to find dead ones on window sills.
Granted, that doesn’t mean it’s the only place they fly, just that they tend to congregate there.
If this is what they are, I’d keep an eye out for more, a swarm may be coming. FWIW, they won’t hurt anything, but they’re obnoxious. Maybe stock up on some bait or one of those tennis racquet things that zaps them. I’ve found the Terro Liquid Ant Bait to work very, very well, at least for their non-winged counterparts.
That’s kind of what I’m thinking, too. I just saw some outside on the patio table. It’s VERY humid right now, on top of the rain we had yesterday-- not enough to hydrate anything except the air.
They look a lot like flying ants. If so, then they are ants on their nuptial flight. Ant colonies will release swarms of winged unfertilized queens and males on certain days when the weather conditions are right (in order to try and synchronize with each other). There should be two sizes of winged ant - the bigger ones are queens and the smaller ones are males. Once a queen has mated, she will shed her wings and look to build a new nest.
