How to stop ants invading your home

Trying to stop an ant invasion can be incredibly frustrating. The individual ants are tiny, but their communities are large. So, getting rid of one wave of invaders doesn’t keep more from sneaking in to your home. With many pests, it’s possible to control an infestation by removing food and water sources and closing off entries. But with ants, crumbs and food smears suffice for food, and their entry points can be the smallest of cracks. Sometimes they don’t even need a crack because they’ve already established a nest indoors. So, learning how to stop ants invading your home involves embracing a variety of strategies.

How to stop ants invading your home: Prevention is better than cure

How to stop ants invading your home? It’s smart to start with fastidious housekeeping. Putting a tray under the cat’s bowl is a good start. Furthermore, rinsing the bowls as soon as your pets finish eating helps, too. If that isn’t enough, though, you might need to resort to pesticides — but in a clever way.

Control strategies: How to stop ants invading your home.

1. Ant spray

Spray is a viable option for controlling visible ants. However, it will have limited success when you have a large scale, permanent ant infestation. All types of ants live in colonies that consist of many individual ants, with one or more egg-laying queens. For permanent control, you need to get rid of the whole colony. This will include the queens and larvae that are growing into the next generation of worker ants.

2. Slow-acting ant control pesticides

Slow-acting pesticides that ants don’t recognize as poison can get rid of the whole colony. When the pesticide is mixed into sweet or fatty bait that they like; foraging ants carry bits back to the nest and share it with their mates. It might take two weeks or longer, but eventually this will do away with the whole colony. You can buy slow-acting pesticide for ants in bait stations enclosed in plastic, a handy, mess-free solution.

3. Ant-control gel baits

Gel formulations, which come in squeezable or syringe-type tubes, are even more effective. The squeezable gel formulations are versatile. Moreover, you can put out lots of small dabs of bait wherever ants are trailing. For example, along cracks and the edges of both horizontal and vertical surfaces.

Gels are more likely to have sweet, sugary baits, which are often favoured by the types of ants found indoors. Ants are choosy about what food that they like. Moreover, they sometimes change their preferences. Luckily, there are numerous brands of both gel baits which include different flavours of bait. Pestcontrol.me.uk experts suggest that: “If a certain type of ant won’t take your bait, you may need to try another”.

Gels marketed to professionals, which homeowners can also buy online, are highly effective. This can be an ideal way to stop ants invading your home.

How to control an ant invasion in your home: Gel bait application

Although the gels are primarily designed so you can squeeze them into cracks. It is also possible to use them in a way that keeps the material off floors and other surfaces.

How to use gel bait to stop ants invading your home:

• Set out short pieces of masking tape, sticky side down, and put a pea-size dab of pesticide on top. Do this where you’ve seen the ants feeding and by any ant trails you can find.
• Ants tend to follow edges, so look alongside kickboards, fascias, counters, skirting boards and similar surfaces. In order to work out which ant trails are headed back to a nest. Try putting a dab of honey or jam on a piece of stiff paper next to where the ants congregate.
• Once they dine, they will head back to the nest and spread the gel bait throughout the colony.

4. Ant-control bait stations

Around children or pets, it might be better to use the plastic bait stations labelled as child-resistant. 

Of course, you can use a combination of strategies. For example, bait stations for where a child can reach and gel for more out-of-the-way areas.

Bait stations and gels are designed to attract ants. As a result, you may see more of them than you did before. Be patient — and do not resort to spraying. This will just warn other ants to stay away and search for food somewhere else in your house. You want the ants to love the bait that you set out and take it home to share.

How to stop ants invading your home

When an ant invasion becomes to complex to handle by the homeowner, it is time to call in the professionals.

How to stop ants invading your home? The pestcontrol.me.uk technicians have the knowledge and experience to control all aspects of a pervasive ant infestation.