Blog: Get rid of ants like a professional
Date: May 2020
Ants are especially skilled home invaders. They are attracted to food, water and shelter, which makes kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms ideal havens for these unwelcome pests to congregate. But fighting an ant infestation can be a relatively quick and efficient process.
The approach to get rid of ants internally will require internal and external application.
1. Eliminate The Food Source and Point Of Entry
Upon discovering an ant infestation, conduct a thorough inspection of your home to identify where the ants are entering. Ants are tiny and capable of crawling through the smallest cracks or gaps, so any home is vulnerable to an ant infestation.
Once you have identified potential entry points, secure them! Fix cracks, repair holes and make sure your window screens are fully intact. You can also apply an insecticidal dust at these entry points to keep ants at bay.
2. Apply the ant bait
Ask any pest control professional and they'll tell you the first step in getting rid of ants in your home is to bait them. Implementing a gel baiting system allows you to use the ants' own anatomy against them. Liquid gel baits (Optigard and Advion gel baits) make it easy for ants to transport the bait and quickly share with the rest of the colony. While the ant bait will ultimately kill the worker ants, it works slowly enough that the workers have time to get back and share the bait with other workers, larvae and the queen. This is the only way to fight the ants you see, and the thousands you don't.
In addition, as the worker ants carry the bait back to the colony, they're also dropping a pheromone trail from the bait to the nest, ensuring that other ants will know where to find the bait, which they will hungrily seek out, making it easy to eradicate the entire colony of ants.
Baiting ants requires some patience on the part a homeowner, as you should expect to see more ants appear in the hours after applying the bait. That's because the bait is intentionally drawing out the ants and attracting as many as possible, so the more ants you see, the more effective that bait will be at eradicating the colony. Especially large ant colonies may take up to 2 weeks to curtail, but smaller infestations can usually be controlled within 24 to 48 hours.
3. Apply a LIquid and Granule Bait externally
Our techincal team have treated thousands of properties for ants and their No1 goto products are Fipforce Aqua / Termidor and Amdro ant granules.
If you treat using the above process above you can expect at anywhere from 3 to 12months ant control.