In this article, you’ll learn how to get rid of ants in the House or apartment. You will find the most effective methods of how to kill ants, like using home remedies and special means. Learn methods of prevention of ants in the House
Contents:
Are Ants in the House Dangerous?
Although ants are very useful creatures in the wild, they are absolutely unwelcomed guests in our homes. At the same time, not all people understand real threat from ants’ infestation. There are several reasons why ants in house is a problem.
- Aesthetic discomfort. It is a very irritated to see ants’ trail in your own house. But when you have a party it is two times unpleasant.
- Dangerous bacteria. Ants are foragers and their aim is to find food everywhere – in garbage cans or on the kitchen table. Besides, hardly anyone would like the food, which has been run over by ants. They spoil products if they are not properly packed. A garbage can is as attractive as a breadbin or a sugarpot. Moving from junk to sugar pot, ants become pathogenic germs carriers like any fly or roach.
- Ants can bite. Their bites can appear an unpleasant nuisance for one group of people and even cause allergic reaction among some others. Red or Fire ants are especially dangerous and sticky.
- Some ants carry potential threat to wood constructions. These are called Carpenter ants. They are usually black and rather big. They like to settle in timber, but they do not feed on it. They use it as a nest, chewing through tunnels. Big colony can significantly damage the wooden house.
Reasons of Ants’Infestation
Once you have noticed a single ant in your kitchen, don’t miss it. You should kill it as soon as possible and not to give any chance to escape and inform other siblings that there is a little stuff in your house. Of course one species isn’t a whole colony infestation. It is just the sign for you to make the kitchen or other room unpleasant for ants. Learn what things attract ants:
- Dirty dishes in the sink, accessible junk cans. Ants are mostly night foragers, and if you leave them at least one plate with little food remains, the insects will be definitely glad to such a gift.
- Crumples and open food on the countertops and on the floor. Ants grab it and carry into their nests to feed their queen and larvae.
- If your neighbours have recently eliminated ants, these insects will undoubtedly visit you to find the shelter with a whole colony. That is why ants’ control becomes more effective when all people of a multi-storeyed house cooperate with one another to kill the insects.
How to Get Rid of Ants: General Rules
Home ants’ nests are mostly inaccessible and the ants themselves are very specific visitors in our flats or houses. But ants’ control is not really a hard challenge if you know their behaviour.
- The ants’ strength is in their nest or colony, where there is a queen ant, larvae and food reserves. If you find the nest and destroy it, all working ants will die out within a week. Otherwise, if the queen is alive, there will be more generations of ants instead of those who died. The homeowners totally don’t need to seek the nest. Modern treatment methods allow eliminating it distantly. What is more, the situation is worse when there is a big colony of ants in the house. In this case ants may have several nests with dozens of queens (both old and young, which are always ready to replace them).
- The second important rule of ants’ killing is to do it together with the neighbours all at once. Here you should take into account that ants may leave the place where there are treatment procedures, getting a refuge in the adjoining flats. After the pest treatment in one flat is completed, they usually try to return, depending on conditions.
- The pest prevention measures should also be taken into consideration. Because simple precautionary measures help to avoid more expensive wastes of money and time.
How to Get Rid of Ants Naturally?
There are a lot of chemical ant killers on the modern market. But before buying even the best chemical remedy against ants, stop and think if the problem really is worth the cost. Who knows, but if the high-effective poisonous ant killer will eliminate the insects, why it may appear safe for people. What is more, some manufacturers often write in the prescription to the treatment to use gloves while applying the pesticide and not to inhale the aerosols or dusts. Besides, these remedies are also dangerous for children and pets.
In case you have faced the ants’ problem recently, try natural methods that are friendly to the environment. Dong them regularly, you will make your house unpleasant for ants. Therefore you will make them go away. The main drawback of using homemade solution is a necessity to wait for at least a week to see the effect.
Ants can be different, for instance, Argentine, Odorous House, Carpenter, Fire, Pavement and Pharaoh Ants. Accordingly, there are a lot of principles of ants’ elimination.
Soapy Water
Soap water kills ants and destroys their footprints, left by ant spies. Ants always use pheromones to mark the paths to the food. In its turn, this is natural way to prevent the pests’ creation of new colonies.
Add 1 teaspoonful of liquid soap to water and spray the mixture on the favourite ants’ places as well as on ants themselves. This remedy can even kill ants. You can enforce the effect, adding some drops of peppermint oil essential.
If you managed to find ants nest outdoors, pour soap water directly on it. This will increase the chance of ants’ extermination. The nest may appear quite big and deep in the ground. So you’ll probably need to repeat the procedure 2 or 3 times.
Barriers
There are natural scents which attract ants and at the same time there are those which scare them. You shouldn’t use insecticides as barriers. Use natural remedies such as orange oil essential, red chili and black pepper, cinnamon and turmeric. Baby powder and soap water are also food treatments. Preventive barriers will work if ants haven’t yet settled inside. These barriers must be an endless line or circle of 6 mm of width.
Sprinkle or apply the remedies using Vaseline at the hot points, doorways, and window-sills or around a table.
These barriers won’t do any harm to people or pets while they are disgusting for ants.
Deterring Scents
Ants don’t like the odour of peppermint (both dry and in essentials), can’t stand lavender or clove oil. Ants prefer to set aside spaces with camphor or laurel leaf. They don’t deter tobacco, tomato and parsley.
Most of these scents won’t discomfort you. You may place some leaves of peppermint in the house. Or plant it around the house. The ants wont’ like it and they will stop their attacks on your property.
There is one more remedy such as garlic. You don’t need to place it about the house as it may scare some of your family members as well. Just wipe the hot places with fresh clove of garlic.. Some products in our house remain partially without defence, for example, sugar or flour. Put a few laurel leaves inside the containers with these products, and ants won’t come near them.
Read also: Home remedies for ants, how to kill ants naturally, review 14 methods!
Ant baits
If deterrent measures don’t work, and you still have no intention to use chemical insecticides, use and baits. They attract the insects with the help of tasty filling (sugar, honey, etc.), but active ingredients kill ants, doing it slowly in order to get ants time to carry the bait into the nest and treat other species, especially the queen. Ant baits are very effective though have rather low level of toxicity even for ants.
Among Wide-Spread Remedies is Borax. Use it As:
- Dry bait. Mix sugar with borax (50/50) and sprinkle the powder in the places that ants visit most frequently.
- Liquid bait. Mix 5 grams of boric acid with 50 grams of sugar and 50 grams of hot water. Then add ½ teaspoonful of jam. Stir the mixture and pour it into little plates, placed in ants entries.
- Potato balls. Take 10 grams of borax, 3 eggs, and 3 middle-sized potatoes. Boil the potato, eggs. Then take out yolks and mix them with potato. Add borax and 1 teaspoonful of sugar. Mix the ingredients carefully and make little balls. Place them in ants’ entries.
Use also Chemical Baits. The most Powerful are:
- TERRO Liquid Ant Bait. It contains liquid bait, which you can use at once without any preparations. Ants enter the container, eat the filling and go to the nest being already contaminated.
- Advion Ant Control Bait Gel is a clear gel with a poison that destroys the ants’ nervous system. The gel is applied as little spots near the insects’ trails and favourite places, such as a garbage can, the door and window frames.
- Maxforce Carpenter Ant Bait Gel. This treatment will help the housekeeper to get rid of carpenter ants very quickly – in 3-5 days. The prolonged action allows ants to bring the bait to the nest and kill the queen.
Food against Ants
Ants can’t digest some kinds of food and that is why don’t reach them. Nevertheless we can use such products as ants poison to get rid of the tiny insects.
- Corn flour and wheat farina when eaten expand in the ants’ intestine causing their death. Use these products fresh.
- Meat with boric acid. Mix 2 tablespoonful of minced meat, boric acid (1/2 teaspoonful). Place the poison along ants’ paths.
- Sweet treatment. Make sweet water with honey or sugar. Little insects will strive for the treatment, but sink in the liquid.
- Yeasts and sugar will be perfect bait. Ants will eat it and take it to the nest. Soon all their food stuff will get spoilt and become uneatable for all species including larvae.
- Coffee mixed with honey or jam is a poison for ants. Use as bait too.
How to Get Rid of Ants by Using Traps?
Ant traps are very helpful when using chemical pesticides is impossible because of pets and children safety. In this case ant and some roach traps will effectively kill the insects and be absolutely secure for people. In this case poisoned bait is placed inside a special plastic container with little holes. The insecticide has low level of toxicity, which allows working ants to grab the treatment and get it to their mound for the queen and larvae. As a result of using such baits, the colony will die out in a day or two.
Read also: Review of the ants traps, what are the ants afraid of?
Calling Pest Control Company
Pest Control Company is the most effective method to get rid of ants. Pest specialists are very experienced about treatments and finding ants’ mounds.
Usually the process of ants’ elimination includes:
- Proper examination with the aim to find the nest. As a result they make a plan.
- Treatment measures using special high-toxically remedies – water, vapour, low temperatures or poisons, which are applied on floorboards, in crackers.
- Control visit to check the effect. If within 3 months there won’t be any sing of ants’ infestation, the extermination is considered completed.
The only disadvantage is high cost of the method compared with others. If you live in a multi-storey block of flats, this method will be positive only when all the house dwellers cooperate and perform a complete elimination together. When used separately in one flat, this method doesn’t work. You should empty the house for one or two days.
Why is It so Difficult to Exterminate Ants?
Home ants’ colonies may account up to hundred thousand species. One queen lays scores of eggs every day, and there may be about a hundred queens in the ants’ mound and even more. That means thousands of new ants will appear and attack a house, in which ants practically don’t have any foes (except the human, of course). As a result if the housekeeper doesn’t eliminate the ants, their quantity will increase very quickly. That is why, within a short period of time the ants inhabit wide territories. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to create a mechanical fence or border between your house and the insects – the smallest species (Pharaoh ants) are only 1,5-2 mm in size and can crawl through any crevices.
Very often they organise their nest in the places that are difficult to reach for people – in vents, in the crackers of the floor, under clay tile and so on. All the attempts to find the nest are senseless; it will be better to kill the nest from the inside. They also attack all adjoining flats in the multi-storeyed building.
Also many people think that it is very simple to get rid of ants with the help of only high-efficient insecticides, which are usually manufactured specifically for creeping insects. In this case people don’t keep in mind special ants’ behaviour and their colonial lifestyle. Getting no results these people then assure others that ants are totally impossible to be exterminated. Of course they are mistaken. The homeowners should follow the correct plan of actions, which is based on the ants’ way of life.
Ants’ Prevention
If there are no ants in your house or flat, this fact doesn’t guarantee that they will never appear though. The housekeeper should be aware what to do to prevent ants’ infestation or at least decrease this possibility as much as possible.
- First of all, don’t leave sweets, crumbles and dirty dishes on the table or in the sink. This is good treat for any home insects. Additionally, keep the dishes clean and garbage bin empty.
- Once a month add a little amount of white vinegar into the water to clean the countertops and floor. Ants dislike this scent. It won’t kill them, but prevent from entering your house.
- Use scotch tape around ventilation. This action will protect your house from ants’ attacks through this way, which is the most typical hot entry for them in a big block of flats.
- The main preventive measure against pests is a clean house. Take away garbage; don’t leave food for pets for a long time or throughout the night. If it is impossible, place the bowl into the bigger one and fill it with water. The ants won’t reach the food and will sink.
- If You have Pets cats or dogs then change them food as soon as she will stand for a day, because the ants sometimes are in a dry food in a bowl for the animal. Also do not throw food to his animals on the floor, but if he did, after wipe the place where lay the food down on the floor was left with a stain or crumbs
- Cereals and sugar should be properly closed in glass or plastic containers.
- The insects never enter the house in which there is nothing to eat.
- If you live in a house, leave plants at least a meter distance from the building. The trees should be trimmed in order to avoid the contact between the roof and tree branches. This measure can prevent ants’ infestation from the roof.
It is really possible to get rid of all types of ants in the house. But all efforts may become useless if there will be pleasant conditions for these insects. Do these actions regularly and the ants will find nothing interesting there and pass by.
