Posted Feb. 1, 2018
Picture yourself walking into the kitchen to grab a snack from the refrigerator. Suddenly, from the corner of your eye, you spot a thin, dark line sliding its way beneath the door into the pantry. A closer look and you realize that dark line is actually a parade of black ants marching in a column along the floor and under the door.
Before you hit the eject button and head for the nearest hotel, the best way of knowing how to get rid of ants in the house is learning a little bit about them. For starters, there are over 12,000 ant species crawling the Earth today, but only a few pose as a pest problem in North America. Those would be the Argentine, odorous house, carpenter, fire, pavement, and pharaoh ants. This is important to know because identifying the species is the first step in knowing how to get rid of ants in the house.
Ants generally nest outside and only invade the home to gather food and water. So if you see ants in the house, it’s likely they’ve found sources of sustenance. And that marching column you see? Those are worker ants following a pheromone trail left by previous scout ants. That pheromone trail is used to guide worker ants from the colony to the food and water source. So, understanding how ants use a pheromone trail to tell others in the colony where sources of food and water is also a key piece of information when it comes to knowing how to get rid of ants in the house.
It’s precisely along those pheromone trails where baits should be placed. Our baits are effective time-delayed insecticide formulated with a carbohydrate-rich attractant that ants can’t resist. Our time-delayed mode of action allows ants the time to consume our bait and bring it back to the colony to share with other ants in the nest, especially the queen.
As the deadly poison is spread throughout the nest, the entire colony will be wiped out in a devastating domino-like killing effect. Most importantly, the insecticide kills the queen. That’s something spray insecticides just can’t do because aerosol insecticides can’t reach way down into the nest where the queen lives.