Ants in the Cupboard
Fall is a good time of year for ants to show up in homes looking for food. The ants normally live in colonies outside the home and enter homes in the fall foraging for food. Ants like anything sweet, greasy, starchy and all kinds of plant and animal materials. Ants compete for humans for the same kinds of food and thus become a nuisance to us. Ants will enter the home through any crack or small hole that offers access into the food storage areas. Older homes offer more opportunities for access since there are more small cracks and crevices for the ant to find as an entry point. The first preventive action should be to seal all cracks and crevices that can be found with a good caulking material. The second preventative step is to scrub around any known entry points with a detergent to remove the trail smells that ants have left for other ants to follow. Spray a residual insecticide around the entry points.
Bait treatments can be used to allow the ants to carry the poison back to the colony on the outside of the house or inside of the house in order to kill the queen for the colony. There are many different types of baits designed for different types of ants. If you have ants that are feeding on sweet items, you have what is called sweet loving ants or an oderous house ant. It is called oderous because when the ant is crushed, it will smell like rotten coconuts.
Purchase a bait that is labeled for the sweet loving ants.
A second type of ant is the grease loving ants. They are the small yellowish ants that prefer greasy places for feeding. These ants are also called "Pharaoh ants".
Pavement ants are brown to black and can be found on stoves or under areas where oil, protein of grease may have collected. Outside, these ants are found in the cracks of sidewalks or many other areas. Mounds of soil along any paved area indicates the presence of these ants. Baits designed for grease ants can go a long way to reduce the numbers of ants foraging in the house.
The key is to get the ants to feed in an area before putting out the bait material. This may seem rather silly to do, actually feed the ants, but they are more likely to feed on the bait if they are accustomed to feeding in a certain area.
Carpenter ants are large black ants about 3/8 inch to ½ inch long and are occasionally found inside the house foraging for food.
These ants normally live in dead trees outside the house but can set up home inside the house feeding on decaying wood. If carpenter ants are found quite often inside the house and there are several of them, it is probably best to contact a professional exterminator as they can find the nest and destroy it.
The homeowner can look for the ants on dead or dying trees on the property and kill the colony on the dead tree as a preventative measure.
