Ant Control

Ant Control


Today's home is better insulated and more energy efficient than ever. You would think that means better sealed to keep pests out. I googled where Ants rank on the pest problem chart. Ants are the number one inquiry at Ohio State's entomology department. According to the NPMA (National Pest Management Association), Ants are the number one concern for pest control companies in the Southern half of the United States.

I once had a customer tell me, "The center of the Earth is made of Ants". This can seem to be true if you are experiencing troubles in your yard with Ants. Ants make up about 15% of the Earth's biomass. That is a lot of Ants. There is a lesser known rumor that I have heard. I couldn't find anything on the Internet to back it up. Rumor: if you counted all the Ants there would be more Ants than all other insects combined. This may or may not be true, but what is true is that Ants are organized and they can be a difficult problem if they have invaded your home.


How To Stop Ants From Coming Inside

So what can you do to stop the Ant invasion? First and foremost, you must locate the colony. 95% of the time this will be outside. There are so many kinds of Ants that we will not go into those right now. There are a few different control methods that are specific to certain species of Ants, but in this post I am going to focus on what can be done generally to stop the Ants from coming inside.


I always look around the base of the home first. You will usually find a trail or several trails coming into the house at some point on the base of the home. This is where a good treatment is needed. A very good repellent spray will work at stopping the Ants from entering there. Be careful not to kill all the Ants. Just spray the repellent there at the entry point. You will use a bait or non-repellent spray to treat the rest of the colony. One important note about repellent sprays: If you spray a repellent, or traditional bug spray on an ant colony it will only move and reappear in a week or two. You are only killing a few of the ants in the colony. On top of that fact, some ant species do a nasty little thing called Budding. This is a defense mechanism, where the colony feels under attack so it divides itself into two or four colonies to survive the attack. Now your problem just got a lot worse.

you should kill all the Ants inside with any good old fashioned bug spray. After a few days go back outside to the spots where the ants where coming in and seal the holes or cracks into the home with caulking.

Baits and Non-repellent Sprays

Non-repellent sprays are not available to the average home owner. These sprays are for licensed pest control companies. They are fairly new on the market and do work exceptionally well. If you are interested in this treatment. I recommend you hire a professional company. Our website is linked on this blog. I will also put a link at the bottom of this post to our site.

Baits are a great ways to control Ants. Ants live and work together in communities, or colonies. The worker Ants collect the food and bring it back to the colony. The problem is, that Ants can't eat the food they collect. They feed it to their larvae, who can eat the food they collect. The larvae turn the food into a sort of juice that can be digested by all. This is then distributed to the entire colony by a process known as trophallaxis. This is the process of regurgitating food back and forth between each other in the colony. Termites and Ants do this. Baits simulate the food needed to feed the colony. They have very slow poisons that allow time for the poison to be distributed between all the Ants. Once this happens the entire colony will be destroyed.

One more thing about baits. They don't always work, they work most of the time. This is why we recommend the non-repellent sprays. These special sprays use the same method. Ants don't know the spray is there Hence the words, "non-repellent". The Ants go through the spray and spread it through the whole entire colony. The poison works very slowly, and then boom all the Ants die after the whole colony is infected.


If you would like a treatment please go to our website: www.idealpestcontrol.com