The kitchen of your Warner Robins, Georgia, home is probably the busiest room in the house. When it’s not being used to prepare meals for the family, it’s doing double duty as an office, a gathering space, board-game central, the preferred location for homework assistance, and a million other things.
Ants are unwelcome visitors in any room of the house, but especially in the kitchen. Unfortunately, the kitchen is the one room in every home that is all but guaranteed to contain some things that ants can’t live without – specifically, food and water.
There are several tactics you can use to avoid attracting ants into your kitchen, mostly involving closing cracks and making sure that you’re not providing the insects with an easy supply of food and water. And if ants do invade, there is a number of useful tools, including baits and sprays, you can use to get rid of ants in the kitchen. The best way to eliminate the intrusion may be partnering with a licensed pest control company.
This month, we’ll examine how to prevent an ant infestation in your kitchen and some reasons why a trained exterminator may be your best bet if the stubborn bugs decide to invade.
Get Rid of Ants by Never Getting Ants
Ants have several defensive and social mechanisms that make it difficult to get rid of an infestation once it’s taken hold. In your fight against ants in the kitchen, the best offense is a good defense. Preventing ants from making their way inside is always the preferred means of handling them.
Seal Them Out
Unfortunately, ants are tiny, stubborn, and really adept at finding cracks, holes, crevices, and other means of sneaking into places where they think they can find food or water. (Or electricity. For reasons that are still unexplained, the red imported fire ant and several other ant species seem to have an attraction to strong electrical currents.)
These characteristics make it very difficult to effectively seal ants out of any kind of house, but it’s not impossible. Regularly walk around the outside of your home and look for cracks, especially around windows and doors. If you see cracks in the walls or foundation, close them up with caulk, sealant, or expanding foam to keep ants out. If your windows or doors are not closing tightly enough, apply weatherstripping as needed to seal things up.
Ants frequently try to come inside during the hotter and dryer parts of the year, looking for water. Even if you’re not seeing ants inside the house, they may be crawling over the outside of your home looking for a way in. On hot, dry days, check your exterior walls for ant activity. If you see columns of ants moving along your walls, follow them to find the crack or hiding place they’re investigating and seal it up.
Remove Ant Attractors
Another best practice for keeping ants out of the kitchen is to ensure that they cannot easily find food and water.
- Make sure all food inside your pantry or cupboards is tightly sealed.
- Never leave food or food scraps sitting out
- Throw away empty food packages and take out the trash regularly
- Clean up any food spills promptly and avoid leaving dirty dishes in the sink
- Wipe up spilled water
- Check your faucets, refrigerator drip tray, dishwasher, and other possible water sources for leaks. Contact a plumber or appliance repair technician to dry up any leaks or drips.
Getting Rid of Ants in the Kitchen
If you start seeing one or two ants in your kitchen, it may not be time to panic. The presence of a couple of ants once in a while is almost inevitable in a kitchen and can be handled just fine with a can of commercially available ant-and-roach spray. However, if you begin to see more than just a handful of insects, if you begin to see them inside food containers, or if you begin seeing marching lines of ants, then you have an infestation, and it’s time to take action.
The two most common retail products for interior ant control are ant-and-roach spray and bait traps. These are both good products that do an excellent job of killing ants, but neither is going to be able to eradicate a full-blown ant infestation.
Ant Sprays
Ant sprays are considered contact insecticides, which means that the ants must come into direct contact with the poison in order to be affected by it. Where this solution falls short is its failure to kill the ants that are still outside or hiding in the walls. These remaining ants can continue to follow the persistent chemical trail laid down by their colony mates to find their way inside and won’t be affected by the spray you already used.
Additionally, most retail ant sprays have a strong smell, are messy, and shouldn’t be used on food-preparation surfaces like many of the surfaces in your kitchen.
Ant Baits
Baits are marginally more effective, attracting ants to come in, take the poisoned bait, and share it around inside the colony. These are the only retail ant control products that are safe to use in a kitchen environment. Unfortunately, ant colonies are enormous, and most retail ant baits aren’t powerful enough to wipe out an entire colony. You may see a short-term decrease in your ant population, but the bugs will be back sooner or later.
Getting Rid of Ants Is No Sweat for Your Pest Control Partner
When you let your local pest control company take on the task of ridding your kitchen of pesky ants, they’ll take a multi-pronged approach designed to take care of your problem for today and prevent it from becoming a problem again tomorrow:
- Thorough inspection of your home to determine the insects’ entry point(s) and seal off any cracks the bugs can use to get inside.
- Use of a persistent, safe insecticide to kill ants that are inside your kitchen or other living spaces and eliminate any other insects that try to get inside the house.
- Installation of potent baits that remaining ants can carry back to the colony, eradicating the entire nest and preventing future infestations.
Make Your Kitchen an Inviting Place for Family and Friends, not Ants! Let National Exterminating Protect Your Warner Robins, GA Home. Call Us: 478-922-1410.
Your Warner Robins home deserves to be pest-free. National Exterminating is ready to earn that trust with our exceptional customer service and cutting-edge pest control solutions. Call us today at 478-922-1410.
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