This is the ant which everybody knows, the good old garden ant. It is found everywhere and no matter what you do, short of sterilising the ground which kills everything, you have just got to live with it. The queen can be as big as 15 mm but the worker or male is only 4 - 5 mm long. These are the flying ants which everybody associates with in middle to late summer (see Figure A).

Ants frequently build their nests in the insulation layers of houses and from there they penetrate up into the house itself through the cracks which inevitably appear in the concrete and cement. Below is a picture showing garden ants burrowing up from the wall of a cellar, notice that they virtually separate the concrete into separate grains hence you end up with a pile of what is actually sand (see Figure B) .

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