Exterminator’s and pest control companies have known for a long time that ants pose one of the more unique set of challenges when trying to rid them from your home and garden. Most homeowners attempting to eliminate ant infestations on their own are unsuccessful due to the fact that ants are social creatures, and when you are actually dealing with a whole colony and not just the individual ants that you see on your property. The ones that you see are only the workers and at any given time less than ten percent of the ants are outside the nest.
When attempting to do your own ant-colony extermination it is necessary to locate the colony and kill the queen. Individual worker ants go out foraging for food and often end up in and around the home. Killing the worker ants is ineffective since the workers can always be replaced– or worse yet if you kill too many of them without getting the queen you can end up stressing the colony. While stressing the colony may seem good at first it is actually counter productive in the pest control effort since if too many workers are lost from the colony then the Sample Pest Control Program For Food Industry colony will become stressed and go into survival mode. When this happens the ant colony slows down its production of worker ants and attempts to produce more queens which will then fly out from the nest and attempt to establish new satellite colonies. For a short period of time (usually several weeks) the homeowner will see far fewer ants in and around their home but ultimately they will end up with even more ants than they had before as the original colony splits to for new colonies and the ants will soon return in even greater numbers than before.
The best way to eliminate ants is to hire a licensed and qualified pest control company however if you want to first attempt to eliminate the ants on your own you will need to find the nest. The best way to locate the nest is to watch for trail of ants and try to follow the individual workers back to their nest. It is also important to use a very powerful insecticide as worker ants leave pheromone trails that can last for up to a year. Other ants can detect these pheromone trails and even months later after the original ants are long gone will attempt to follow them and re-establish a new nest in the same area as the old nest. For this reason you will need to use a very powerful insecticide or lots of it should you choose to do it yourself and use an over the counter product since most over the counter ant control products are diluted to roughly one seventh the strength of professional grade products. When treating the outside of an average sized home a pest control company will use an average of five gallons of product that is seven times stronger than the ant control products commonly sold in home improvement and garden stores. In order to achieve the same effect you would get from a professional exterminator you would thus need to use about thirty-five gallons of the weaker over the counter products commonly sold to consumers.
Once the ant colony has been eliminated it is then necessary to eliminate what was attracting the ants to your property to begin with. In the case of carpenter ants there is usually a water problem somewhere causing wood to rot and create a hospitable environment for the ants. Thief or pharaoh ants Side Effects Of Pest Control Chemicals are often attracted by a food source that needs to be eliminated to prevent re-infestation. While it is certainly possible to eliminate ant infestations on your own you may benefit from having a pest control company perform an inspection and help you with your unique set of pest control issues.
Home