Have Ants Present For Our Inspection
Our strategy for indoor ant treatments is simple. Track ants back to where they are entering the living space. Apply control products to those areas. Think of where you have seen them. Have you seen them pop out of a crevice? This can be under a baseboard, door frame, sliding glass door, out from an electric outlet or window frame. You want to find this crevice before our arrival. Or, you will want to have enough ants for us to track back to these locations. Using store-bought sprays can be counterproductive to this method. All in all, you don’t want to do anything that will mess up their ant trail or contaminate our bait applications.
Why You Do Not Want To Spray Yourself
Our ant exterminators use non-repellent aerosols, foam, dust, granular and gel bait formulations. Non-repellent products kill ants slow enough that they can transfer it to other ants. The ants track through these products without altering their pheromone trails.
Repellent pesticides are pyrethroids. (Any product with the active ingredient ending in “thrin”.) Most organic sprays are considered repellents too. Between the two, they are the sprays sold in stores. These sprays kill ants fast. Pyrethroids label themselves as contact sprays with a residual. So, they drop the ants dead on contact and last several weeks after application. Organic sprays kill insects on contact yet have little residual. These characteristics come across as a repellent or barrier effect. Not exactly what you want when controlling ants though.
Professional ant control products are far superior. Using them is a different type of application too. With store bought sprays, you are killing the few ants that wander inside your home. And you are attempting to disrupt the foraging ant trails leading into your home. This isn’t the most reliable process. DIY ant spray can cause “budding”. This splits the colony and can complicate your issue even further. We only recommend using a fasting acting product is to soak nests with the spray. Locating nests can be difficult if you do not know how. With small ants there can be many nests in one super colony. Super colonies can spread multiple properties wide. This is why it is best to call an exterminator to get rid of your ants.
Bait And Switch
We always want to see lots of ants instead of none. Prior to our arrival, you may put out capfuls of sugar water/ honey/ syrup drops. Place them where you have seen the ants recently. This will develop a pheromone trail and help locate where ants are entering the living space. Many people use Terro ant bait. This has a similar effect.
Pre-baiting allows us to perform a “bait and switch”. This is where an ant trail develops after placing food attractant out. Once the ants come marching in, we replace the attractant with ant control products. The best option is to follow the ant trail as far back to the nest as possible. Then apply bait at this location. This cuts off the pheromone trail and prevents the ants from coming further inside of your house. In this case, we use a syringe to inject gel bait into the crevices in which they emerge. This contains the product so children and pets cannot access it. Otherwise, we use Maxforce Quantum bait stations.
With baiting, expect more activity before there is less. Ants will remain active for 3-5 days after feeding on the bait. Let them be if you see them.