Ants can be a problem to home-owners any time of the year, regardless of the temperature or weather conditions. There are an estimated 22,000 species of ants in the world, and colonies can range in size from a few dozen to a few million. They are smart, adaptive insects that have a very complex social structure. Ants will invade your home through-out the year in search of both food sources and a protected nesting environment.
The ants that you typically see inside your home are the “foraging” ants of the colony. This means while they may not have set up shop inside your house yet, they have found a way into your home and that way in is now marked for the rest of the colony to follow. Ants, once they establish a path to food and water, give off a pheromone (or scent) all the way back to the nest that tells the others right where to go for dinner. Ants can use these pheromones in other ways too – like a crushed ant gives off an alarm scent that signals that sends nearby ants into attack mode and bring in more ants from further away. Oh and to make it worse, foragers will travel up to 700 feet from their nest looking for food – so having ants in your kitchen doesn’t necessarily mean you have a nest inside, just that they have found a way in and they are letting their family know too.
One of the problems we see when taking care of ants is the fact that the home-owner has usually already tried to take care of it themselves, and in that process in-advertitly made things worse. That is because whether it was an aerosol can or spray can, they probably sprayed the ants trails, which in turn confused them and drove the ants into harder to reach areas. That and those products act as “contact-killers”, meaning if you hit them with it at the time they will die, but there is no residual affect (or very little) and the chemical is not getting back to the nest. To eliminate ants from your home, YOU MUST ELIMINATE THE COLONY!
That’s where we come in. Let our trained professionals come in, access your situation, and deploy one of several methods to help eliminate your ant problem for good! No more trips to the store, staying out of the kitchen, or worrying about spraying in your house, you just leave the work to us. So call today to be Ant-Free and start enjoying your summer without looking at every bite of food first.