Effective Ant Control Methods Explained | Grove Pest Control

When customers call with an ant problem, they go through the litany of products they have already tried, most of them over the counter products you get at your local hardware store. The big question is why hasn’t the stuff they are using worked? They spray and spray and bait and bait and nothing!

There are a couple of factors that come into play when trying to solve an ant problem, and we here at Grove Pest Control are pretty good when it comes to solving these ant issues. One thing to consider is that ants are a community. There could be a thousand ants or a million ants in a nest and each ant has its own job. So when you buy your over-the-counter spray you kill off the ants you see crawling on the counter and any that might crawl through the spray a day later, but over time the spray becomes less strong and what happens? Ants return. Why?

Well in the example above you might have killed off 50 ants that were crawling on the counter and each morning you came down from bed to find 50 more dead, and so on, but don’t forget, there could be tens of thousands of ants back at the nest, and the ants have noticed that their population has decreased, and they are worried, so now they send a squad to set up another community, somewhere far away from the kitchen, like the living room. Now you have 2 nests, both are working hard to replace the dead, and growing. This is called budding.

So what do the pros do differently? For one thing we use a chemical that is known as a non-repellant. All that means is that it is slower acting. We also use baits, that are again slower acting. I’m reminded of a customer in the Willow Grove area of Pennsylvania, in Upper Moreland, who was battling ants for years. He had ants all over the house. Remember budding? Yep. They budded like there was no tomorrow. So we went in and found trails of ants entering the home from the outside, trailing right up they outside walls to various cracks in the foundation. We sprayed these areas with the non-repellant chemicals both inside and outside and I let them know to have patience and to NOT spray anything additional, because that would counter act what we were doing. The non-repellant sprays allowed the ants that were trialing to return to the nests and spread those chemicals from within, as they groom and feed each other, they spread the chemical, ultimately killing it off from inside the colony. We also used a granular bait and some gels. So between the sprays and the baits the customer noticed a decrease in activity rather quickly, within the week they are gone.

I’ll give you some interesting insight into baits and why they work hand in hand. Ants that you see crawling around and all the soldiers inside the colony and the queen and everyone else can’t digest food. So all the crumbs or spilled juice or baits that ants are attracted to get carried back to the colony. The ants then feed the larva the food and the larva eat it, digests it, and regurgitates it back to the ants who then feed everyone else in the colony. So, the larva never develops because they are poisoned by the bait and they have provided food that has been laced with the baits as well. So the demise of the ant colony begins.