Monday, March 15, 2010

Getting Rid Of Ants - The Battle Is Back On

A little over a year ago, our house was invaded by ants. They came, they saw, they stayed for a while (despite my best efforts), then after about 4 months they left.

By the time they left, we'd been nearly driven to distraction. I'd even gone so far as to create this website. But then they left so we relaxed (and as you may have noticed, I stopped writing here).

The Ants Are Back

A couple of months ago, almost a year to the day of their first appearance, the ants came back.

I am now entirely convinced that food is NOT the primary motivation for these ants - it's shelter. We live in a sub tropical area and it rains a lot at this time of year. I guess having their nests flooded every day would leave the average ant looking for drier accommodation - and what more could they want than a house?

Another Ant Invasion

We first noticed the ants were back when they invaded our en-suite bathroom. They massed in all 4 corners of the ceiling. I estimate that there were about 800 ants in the room.

The only thing for it was to bring out the insect killer spray (I normally call it fly spray). It's great for killing ants, but I don't like to use it unless we really have to, as we have young children and I'm sure it can be harmful to them - I'm worried about the health implications.

The Ants Send Out Scouts

After the first major invasion, we went through a period of several weeks where the ants didn't mass inside the house. They were coming into the house, but they were staying in the walls.

They then started to send out scouts. In any room in the house you'd find between 1 and 5 ants, travelling by themselves. In one day I killed about 100 ants, never more than 2 of them together. They were obviously working out where the ant swarm were going to move next.

My philosophy is to kill as many ant scouts as I can - I figure that if no message gets back to Ant HQ, they'll assume that something went wrong for those scouts and they won't move the rest of the ant colony into my bathroom (or whichever room they're in).

Ant Highways

The ants have several highways into the house. They come streaming into the house - by my calculations, there are more than 1000 ants coming into our house per hour, per highway. There are ants coming out as well, but it's obvious that they've created an ant nest within our walls.

There seems to be no way to permanently eradicate their highways.

When I block / destroy one highway, they re-establish it within a day or so, normally by just taking a slightly different route (another tiny hole in the mortar, a different pole up to the roof). In some cases, they just keep right on going on the same route, after a day or so to count their losses.

Yes, I use Outdoor Surface Spray, that claims to be professional grade, and the ants are back crawling over it within a couple of days! They even lift their bottoms up, presumably so they have less contact with the poison. It's amazing!

And yes, I've had a professional pest control company spray the house, paying special attention to the major highway entry points.

Final Thoughts

It's an ongoing battle and one that I'll write more about in future. I WILL beat these ants eventually - or at least I can be confident that they'll leave again at some point in the future, just as they did last time. Or maybe they'll get me in the end. Wish me luck!

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