So, you came downstairs one morning and found a
trail of ants coming out of the wall behind your backsplash and making their
way into your pantry and back and you want to get rid of these ants. You’re not
sure quite what they’re carrying, but they sure seem busy at it – and they show
no signs of slowing down. Where did they all come from?
Well, no matter where the ant nest is, the
foragers in the colony will go up to 700 feet to find food, and they leave
their scent on their trails to find their way back and forth. If you consider
that the average residential lot is 40 to 60 feet deep, that means that the
ants might be coming a long way to raid your pantry.
But how do ants decide where to build colonies?
Places near likely food sources are popular, and once a group of ants has
chosen a building site, and a colony is up and running, the queen will start to
lay eggs, and won’t stop. She stored sperm cells during the “nuptial flight”
that led to the creation of the colony, and the decision to use those or not
will determine whether her offspring is male or female. With the right
nurturing, these eggs could become queen ants one day as well.
So, once the colony is in place, foragers go out
to bring food back to the ant queen, and other ants in there with them. These
colonies can be underground, in crawl spaces in your house, on top of the
ground – anywhere where there’s space and some construction material. Then, the
ants will inevitably find food, and they will keep coming as long as food is
available for them to eat, and to take back to the rest of the colony.
So what can you do? Remove the ants’ incentive
for showing up in your kitchen. Put away your leftovers, clean the sugar off
your countertops, and make sure that you take your trash out regularly.
Anything that might have some sugar in it will attract ants, which means that
you can have these pests in your home indefinitely. Good housekeeping will send
the ants to another house to victimize, though.
Professional Pest Control For Ants
If you have a serious ant infestation, and your
home remedies haven’t worked, and you’ve even set off an ant bomb or two, and
they’re still coming, it may be time to bring in a professional to take care of
the situation for you. After all, you don’t want ants in your clothes, or
crawling into bed with you, or traveling to school with your kids.
So, when the pest control guy team shows up at
your house, there are several steps he will take to help you get rid of the ant problem. The first is treating the exterior perimeter of your house. he will
walk around the outside of your home with a tank, or a bag, dusting or spray
the exterior of your home. The purpose of this treatment is to eliminate
colonies on the outside of your house, and to create a barrier to stop ants
from entering your home from the outside. It won’t keep ants from following the
power lines into your house, or from using trees as a way in, and these
treatments won’t do much if you already have a colony inside your walls, but
this is a start.
But what if you already have ants inside your
house? Pest Control Brisbane professionals have come up with several
innovative ways to fight ants inside your “interior wall voids,” since we can’t
open them up and fire a flamethrower at the ants in there. With the new
popularity of foaming chemicals, it’s become a lot easier to treat interior
spaces without ripping out sheet rock – spraying the foaming chemicals through
small holes into the voids goes a long way toward getting rid of the ant
colonies inside. We can also remove bed bugs from your home.
The ants just eat the foaming insecticide, carry
it back to the queen, and they all die together. Dusts do the same thing
although they are a lot easier for ants to avoid. If you’re going to put down
dust, you have to know just where the ant trail is, because they will keep
following that scented trail until you eliminate it. Also, if you are in humid
surroundings, dust may turn into a cake instead of eliminating ants.
