[Annual Ant Control Issue] Nuisance No. 1

Ants belong to a large family of social insects, are found in practically every environment and will search for food and water wherever they can gain access. In any case, when ants try to take over your customers’ kitchens, they become pests.

Nuisance ants are small (1/16- to 1/4-inch) and may be black, brown or yellow in appearance. They find their way to beverage cans and sweets, form long lines in and out of the pantry and hustle back and forth to food spilled on counters and floors. These ants are the ones that you can count on one hand in the morning, but by mid-afternoon hundreds can be counted in the same area. The abundance of these ants moving about in your customer’s home, trailing to sources of food and water, makes them a nuisance pest.

Most ant problems indoors originate outdoors. Ants spend most of their time searching for food to feed the queen, her young and their nonforaging colony companions. Ants leave the colony to search for food and water until they get lucky and blunder onto "goodies" left, for example, on the kitchen counter or the floor; in the recycling bin, trash compactor, garbage can; or the pet’s feeding dish. Ants don’t "decide" to enter homes to bother customers or pest management professionals. They are there only because of the food and water sources the homeowner has provided them.

Once food is found, the ants communicate to other ants in the nest that a supply of food has been located. Upon returning to the nest, the scout ants share the food with other ants in an effort to recruit them to the food supply. Ants return to the food by following a chemical trail laid by the scout ant as it returns to the nest. Each ant that makes the trip will also mark the trail with chemicals called pheromones. In a matter of an hour or two, hundreds of ants may be seen crawling on a kitchen counter in what appears to be a single-file line.

The "spark plug" of any ant colony is the queen(s). A queen’s job is to lay as many eggs as possible. She uses tremendous energy in the process and must be fed constantly. Eggs hatch into grub-like immatures that require constant care by the workers. Workers must continue to find food to feed their ever-growing colony, as well as the queen. The larvae finally mature into workers who will then continue to maintain the colony by searching for food and caring for the queen.

CUSTOMER Q&A. Following are several questions and answers that your customers may have for you regarding the treatment of nuisance ants.

Q: Do a few ants spell trouble?

A: Sighting of a few ants might mean the beginning of a more significant problem. These few ants may be looking for food; others may be following a chemical trail to a food source. One suggestion is to collect a few ants that you see in a napkin or toilet paper (don’t spray them) and wait to see if more ants show up. It’s a good guess that if you see more ants walking in a straight line in the same area that they have connected your house and their nest with a pheromone trail. If ants don’t reappear, then the problem is solved since you did not give the ants an opportunity to get back home.

Q: How long will it take to control the nuisance ants?

A: It may only take a few minutes to solve your problem if you can find the nest or the ant’s entry point(s) into your home. However, it might take a few weeks to eliminate the ants when the nest can’t be found or the trails traced.

Q: Can the ants be nesting in my house?

A: If you see ants inside your home during cold months, then they may be nesting indoors or beneath the foundation. Heating your home in the winter allows the ants indoors to be active year round while the ants outside lie dormant. It becomes more difficult to determine where the ants are nesting in the warm months. They could be foraging indoors and returning to an outside nest or heading to an inside nest.

Q: What can I do to control nuisance ants?

A: There are a number of easy-to-implement steps that you can follow to get the upper hand on invading ants, but it’s going to take patience, diligence and time on your part.

• Wipe out the indoor chemical trail. Whenever you see ants trailing or crawling, wipe off or wet-mop these areas using a cleaning agent. Use the nozzle attachment of your vacuum cleaner to remove food from every crevice in the areas where ants are seen. This two-pronged approach is needed to break the ants’ pheromone connection between their nest and the infested areas of your home. It’s also meant to eliminate food and beverage residues.

• Feed and follow the ants. This approach is designed to locate the ant nest by letting the ants find the food source and then following them back to the nest. Sugar water, for example, is an excellent attractant. Other attractants that can be used include peanut butter, jelly and bacon grease. For sweet-loving ants, mix a heaping teaspoon of sugar in a cup of water. Soak cotton balls in the sugar water and place them on pieces of wax paper where ants are seen. Within 20 to 30 minutes you should see many more ants. The quicker the ants show up, the higher the likelihood that the nest is close by. If you can then follow the ants and locate where they are entering the house, you may be able to track them back to their nest.

Most, but not all, nuisance ants are most active in the early morning hours or in the late part of the afternoon, as ants don’t like to travel when the temperature gets too hot. Set out the sugar water or other baits around 8 a.m. or 5 p.m., during the cooler parts of the day. Outdoors it’s fairly easy to follow the ant trail once it is located. The ants will follow the invisible pheromone trail and will not venture far from it. While it’s difficult to generalize, most outdoor nests are located within 50 feet of the house; many are along the side of the home just under mulch, landscape timbers, decorative stones or areas that are paved. Eventually, if you’re lucky, the trail will end under an object with the ants trailing in and out of a small nest entrance.

Once the nest has been located, you can physically remove it (e.g., an infested log or tree stump) or have a pest management professional treat it with an insecticide.

• When the nest can’t be found. The nest is not always easy to find. Don’t be discouraged if the ants you are following disappear, for example, under a baseboard or a concrete slab.

At this point, it’s difficult to say where the ant nest might be located. The nest could be inside a structural void such as a wall or the ants could be exiting through a wall to an outside nest. Further, the ants may be trailing along a pipe to a nest that is underneath the foundation. At this point, it is likely necessary for you to contact a pest management professional for help.

If the pest management professional decides to use baits to treat for the ants, it is important that you not spray or use cleaning agents in areas where ants are present. If you spray an insecticide, you will disrupt the ants, making control more difficult.

• Seal up the entry points. Caulk cracks and crevices where ants are entering and leaving your home. While you are caulking the entry point, also make sure that the areas around the doors and windows are sealed. If not, apply caulking to these areas as well.

• Skip the whole-yard treatments. Seldom is it justified to treat the entire yard. Although ants criss-cross large areas of your yard, their nest(s) may or may not be on your property. It is impossible to make your yard an "ant-free zone" for extended periods of time. While it is true that treating the entire yard with an insecticide will result in immediate temporary relief, it’s not environmentally sound to apply insecticide to the entire yard area.

Another reason not to "blanket" the yard with an insecticide is that multiple applications would be required, from late spring through early fall, to compensate for the chemical breakdown of each treatment due to heat, moisture and sunlight. The ants quickly rebound as the chemical residual disappears.

The best use of your time and money is to drench individual nest sites or mounds as they are found and to treat specific areas where ants are trailing.

CONCLUSION. Ants can be persistent pests in and around homes. Therefore, you must be equally persistent in your efforts to control them. Careful observation, good sanitation and sound landscape management practices are your most valuable tools.

The authors are coordinator, Purdue Pesticide Programs, Purdue University; assistant professor, Department of Entomology, University of Georgia; and technical director and staff entomologist, Varment Guard, Columbus, Ohio.