Have you noticed that when the temperatures start warming up at the end of winter you start seeing ants crawling all over your kitchen counter? Spring is almost here, and those warming temperatures are waking up the colony that's stayed all snug and cozy inside your walls through the cold months.
Their food supplies are low, and it's time for the foragers to go gathering.
You pay little attention to the ants at first because you only see three or four of them crawling along the edges of the counter top.
Normally you just squish the ones you see, and keep on doing whatever you were doing.
A couple days later you notice movement again, and suddenly you're looking at a dozen or more ants moving back and forth along the counter wall.
After another few days you walk into your kitchen and there's a cluster of ants all over one spot on your counter.
You look closer, and see they've found a few breadcrumbs, and they've formed lines of ants, one line crawling to the little pile of crumbs, and another line carrying those crumbs back toward the hole where they're coming out of the wall.
As the days become weeks you see more and more ants, and now they really start getting on your nerves because they're all over your counter, they're in your cabinets, and they're attacking your food containers.
Ever wonder how the ants find those little bits of food? Much of the time you see a crowd of ants piling all over something you can't even see.
You know it's food of some kind that you've spilled or dropped, and didn't clean up only because it's so small that you didn't see it.
Ants are experts at sniffing out those little spills, and droppings.
When their food supplies need rebuilding a few scouts head out looking for anything edible.
The scouts leave a scented trail that shows them the way home.
Those trails are a lot like Hansel and Gretel's trail of bread crumbs in the forest only better because birds eat Hansel and Gretel's crumbs (and ants find them), while ant trails have a smell that ants follow.
That smell doesn't disappear so quickly like breadcrumbs can.
So the scouts leave their scented trail on their way to finding a food source.
That trail tells the scout where home is.
When the scout finds food, it grabs a load, and starts back along the trail it left on the way to the food.
As it carries the food back to the colony it leaves a new trail.
This trail has a different smell, a smell that the worker ants follow to the food so they can haul it back to the colony.
That's all interesting enough isn't it, but it doesn't fix your problem of ants all over your counter, in your cabinets, and attacking your food does it? What pest control techniques can you use to do that? If you don't want those ants bugging you all spring and summer long your first step is clean up all those spills and droppings where you find ants gathering.
Doesn't matter if you see anything in that spot, if ants are traveling to, crowding up on, and crawling away from a certain area along the same trail they came from, something edible is there.
Clean that place with soap and hot water to get rid of whatever food the ants found there.
Next use soap and hot water to wash away their scented trail.
Clean along the path where you see two lines of ants crawling.
It's where the ant lines are going in opposite directions.
If you wash away their trail the ants at the food source get lost, and can't find their way home.
And the ants coming out of the colony have no way of finding their way to where the food was.
Keep doing just those things, and you force the ants to look for food someplace else.
You won't get rid of the ants, but they won't send a large invasive force into your kitchen.
As long as you keep things clean all you'll see are those occasional scouts.
Their food supplies are low, and it's time for the foragers to go gathering.
You pay little attention to the ants at first because you only see three or four of them crawling along the edges of the counter top.
Normally you just squish the ones you see, and keep on doing whatever you were doing.
A couple days later you notice movement again, and suddenly you're looking at a dozen or more ants moving back and forth along the counter wall.
After another few days you walk into your kitchen and there's a cluster of ants all over one spot on your counter.
You look closer, and see they've found a few breadcrumbs, and they've formed lines of ants, one line crawling to the little pile of crumbs, and another line carrying those crumbs back toward the hole where they're coming out of the wall.
As the days become weeks you see more and more ants, and now they really start getting on your nerves because they're all over your counter, they're in your cabinets, and they're attacking your food containers.
Ever wonder how the ants find those little bits of food? Much of the time you see a crowd of ants piling all over something you can't even see.
You know it's food of some kind that you've spilled or dropped, and didn't clean up only because it's so small that you didn't see it.
Ants are experts at sniffing out those little spills, and droppings.
When their food supplies need rebuilding a few scouts head out looking for anything edible.
The scouts leave a scented trail that shows them the way home.
Those trails are a lot like Hansel and Gretel's trail of bread crumbs in the forest only better because birds eat Hansel and Gretel's crumbs (and ants find them), while ant trails have a smell that ants follow.
That smell doesn't disappear so quickly like breadcrumbs can.
So the scouts leave their scented trail on their way to finding a food source.
That trail tells the scout where home is.
When the scout finds food, it grabs a load, and starts back along the trail it left on the way to the food.
As it carries the food back to the colony it leaves a new trail.
This trail has a different smell, a smell that the worker ants follow to the food so they can haul it back to the colony.
That's all interesting enough isn't it, but it doesn't fix your problem of ants all over your counter, in your cabinets, and attacking your food does it? What pest control techniques can you use to do that? If you don't want those ants bugging you all spring and summer long your first step is clean up all those spills and droppings where you find ants gathering.
Doesn't matter if you see anything in that spot, if ants are traveling to, crowding up on, and crawling away from a certain area along the same trail they came from, something edible is there.
Clean that place with soap and hot water to get rid of whatever food the ants found there.
Next use soap and hot water to wash away their scented trail.
Clean along the path where you see two lines of ants crawling.
It's where the ant lines are going in opposite directions.
If you wash away their trail the ants at the food source get lost, and can't find their way home.
And the ants coming out of the colony have no way of finding their way to where the food was.
Keep doing just those things, and you force the ants to look for food someplace else.
You won't get rid of the ants, but they won't send a large invasive force into your kitchen.
As long as you keep things clean all you'll see are those occasional scouts.