You’ve found ants in your kitchen cupboard and trailing around your kitchen sink, so how do you get rid of them once and for all!
This first thing you need to understand about ants is that there are over 200 different species in Australia and unless you remove the food source and eradicate the colony, ants will continue to enter your home.
How To Get Rid of Ants in 8 easy steps
- You need to first understand that ants are social and live in a colony
To solve an ant problem, you need to first eliminate the ones you don’t see to get rid of the ones you do see. It sounds strange, but it’s true. This is because the queen — the one who lays all the eggs — never leaves her nest. She just stays there, being fed by the workers (the ones you see) and continuing to reproduce more ants. So you can spray the ones you do see if an aerosol from Bunnings, but the queen will continue to reproduce and new ants will replace the ones you killed.
- Secondly you need to watch the trailing ants.
So, although it may sound silly, the first step in controlling ants is simply watch the ones you see in your home to see where they are coming from and going to. An ant will seek food, but once it finds food, the ant will return to its nest with the crumb, leaving a scent trail behind it. By doing so, the ant leaves a pheromone “ant trail” for its fellow worker ants to help in gathering the food.
- Hold-off initially the urge to use a repellent spray to kill ants
As discussed in point 1, the ants that you see are worker ants. Their job is to find food and take it back to feed the queen and her young, who are being groomed as the next generation of worker ants. Because of this, these worker ants are your ticket into the colony. If you spray and kill these ants, the colony will simply send out more workers, and you’ll never reach the queen. So what do you do? See #4:
- Use a gel bait or liquid bait
Instead of eliminating the worker ants, use them! Following all label directions, place ant bait gel (Optigard is our preference) along the trail you identified (in #2). The workers will find the bait, carry it back to the nest, and feed the queen, eventually killing her and eliminating future populations. We recommend Optigard gel bait as from our experience it is the only gel bait that works on both protein (meat ants) and carbohydrate (sugar ants). Alternatively for liquid feeding sugar ants we recommence Maxforce Quantum liquid ant bait killer to be used in AntCafe’s.
- Hold off on cleaning
Although it is good to eliminate other food sources, you don’t want to mop away the ant’s odor trail yet. The trail will now lead the workers to your bait instead.
- Be patient.
The ants will carry the insecticide bait back to the nest, but it can take several days to eliminate the colony, or even a few weeks if the colony is very large or it has several queens. You may even need to replace the bait station if they empty the food or liquid bait.
- External spray with a non repellent liquid to control internally
With the introduction of a new class of chemicals containing the active ingredient Fipronil, achieving long term control of ants through applying an external spray has produced outstanding internal control of ants. Fipronil which is slow acting and non repellent to ants and termites is the toxicant in the products Termidor and Fipforce, two of the leading products used by professional in Australia. An external non repellent spray to the perimeter of the house (30cm up and 30cm out from the wall) with Termidor or Fipforce together with the application of ANTHEM (Fipronil) granules to gardens and pathways) will control ants for up to 3 months and due to its slow acting transfer properties can wipe out the queen.
- Keep it clean.
Like all living creatures, ants need water, food, and shelter for survival. Ants will leave the shelter of their colony to seek food and water. Don’t make it easy for them! Keep foods sealed, floors swept, and all surfaces cleaned.
Check out our shop to find more advice on how to control ants using the products above.
Optigard gel bait, Fipforce Aqua, Termidor, Maxforce Quantum, ATHEM, ant control made easy