How To Get Rid Of Ants

Nearly every household, at one stage or another, will have a problem with black ants coming into their kitchen. Normally, the first ants that come in are simply looking for a food source. Probably looking for a little bit of sweet juice left in the bottom of a drinking bottle, maybe a little bit of sweet tea left on the bottom of a saucer, or a teaspoon left overnight.

These are the things that the ant will come searching for. Now, those first ants are the workers that will then go back and tell the nest, where there'll be thousands of ants, "There's a good food source here” and the next thing that you know is, before you know it, you've got thousands of ants following a trail into your kitchen, and finding something that you haven't cleaned up, maybe, as well as you might have done. The first thing to do is get rid of those food sources.

Anything sweet and sticky, anything that the children may have left underneath a chair, underneath a settee: get rid of those food sources straight away, because that's what the ants are after. It may need cleaning with bleach over the trail, but if you follow that trail back, you may be able to find the ants' nest. They'll be coming in underneath gaps around window frames.

They'll be coming in around gaps around doors. Outside those back doors and the window frames, you may find a little bit of sandy soil, and that will be where the ant nest is. Now, you could just get a trowel, dig it up, and if you see lots of little white eggs and panicking ants, then that will definitely be the nest.

You can spray it with an insecticide. The old method would be to pour boiling water over it. Those methods will kill that ants' nest.

There will be thousands more nests outside, and certainly if you've got a patio, you'll be very, very aware of little piles of sand up between the flagstones on the patio. That will be another nest. That will be harder to get rid of.

You could use a gel bait, a covered gel bait that's available from garden centers, that the ants take back and will feed all the other ants that are still in the nest. Once the queen is dead, the whole nest will totally disappear. However, if you see the mating flight, which on a warm summer's thundery day, you may see thousands and thousands of winged ants flying around, then that's a mating flight.

There's nothing any pest control company can do about those. You have to let them finish their flight, and within a couple of hours, they will all have disappeared. If you've got loads and loads of ants around the outside of your house, then that's possibly when you need to call in a professional pest control company such as Clean Kill, and we'll carry out a thorough insecticidal spray.

That will get rid of the problem of black ants in your house. A pest control professional discusses how to make your house less attractive to ants and suggests several methods you can use to eradicate an ant colony that's plaguing you.