Ants can be annoying, especially when they invade the house. Outside, ants digging up dirt in pavers can cause damage and biting ants in the lawn can be a safety concern. Why homeowners try and get rid of ants, most find that no matter what you do, the ants always come back! The reason for this is that if you don’t kill the queen (or queens) in the nest, even if you kill a large number of worker ants, the colony will always recover.
So how do you kill the queen and eliminate the colony? Expert knowledge and specialist ant products…
Why supermarket ant products don’t work…
When most homeowners try and tackle an ant problem, they will simply grab the aerosol under the sink and spray the ants they see and maybe treat surrounding surfaces. This may delay them for a while, but this won’t kill the queen and they’ll soon be back.
Not to be beaten, some homeowners will venture down to the supermarket or hardware store to get some specialist ant products or “the good stuff”. But which products should you choose and is there any “good stuff”? The sprays or concentrates in supermarkets and hardware stores are based on old insecticides and are not suitable for ants (we’ll come back to this later).
However, there are some ant baits available to consumers and these could be worth a try. The challenge here, is that different ant species have different food preferences, and so which bait should you choose? No one bait works on all ant species. Most of the baits available to consumers are sugar-based baits, but many of the pest species prefer oil or protein. And then, assuming you have bought the correct product, there is most definitely a skill to applying the bait correctly. Get this wrong and the bait “won’t work”.
Ants are one of the most difficult pests to control and a good knowledge of their behaviour is the key ingredient in designing a control program and which is why professional ant treatments are the way to go for successful elimination of ant problems.
Professional ant treatments
In dealing with any ant problem, correct identification of the species at hand is the first step in any treatment. By identifying the ant correctly and understanding its nest structure, likely nest location, feeding preferences and foraging strategy, the best products and correct application regime can be determined.
Ant baits are an essential tool for eliminating ant nests. Foraging ants pick up the bait, which is a combination of food and slow acting insecticide, and take in back to the nest. There it is fed to all their nest mates, including the queen – essential for killing the nest. It needs to be slow acting so that the bait has time to be spread throughout the nest before it starts to have an effect and the ants realise anything is wrong. Depending on the ant species and size of the nest, baits can take anywhere between a couple of days and up to two weeks to eliminate the colony.
The skill in a successful ant baiting program is choosing the right bait for the species causing the problem. Different ant species have different food preferences, so it’s important to choose a bait that will be attractive to the specific species. It’s also important to know where to place the bait and apply it in sufficient quantity, to make sure there is enough bait to spread around the nest – the bigger the nest, the more bait is required.
Although baits are important in ant control, sprays are also a useful tool and indeed sometimes essential. Certainly, to keep ants out of the house, spraying around the perimeter of the building is required. But sprays are also important if there is a major infestation over a large area. Some ant species have multiple queens and can create hundreds of nests all part of the same colony. It isn’t possible to apply enough bait to eliminate all these nests, so it is sometimes necessary to use specialist ant sprays to keep the numbers down, with regular applications required.
These specialist ant sprays are not available in hardware stores. They are non-repellent, which allows the ants to walk over the treatment picking up the insecticide. They are also quite slow acting which allows the insecticide to be transferred to other nest mates through normal contact, magnifying their effect.
It is this combination of knowledge, ant baits and specialist ant sprays which allows professionals to get rid of ant problems.
Whether you have ants in the house, ants digging up pavers, biting ants in the yard or funnel ants ruining the lawn, call the experts at Rebel Pest Professional for a specialist ant treatment and guaranteed elimination.