Arm Yourself Against Summer Ant Invasions
TERRO® Liquid Ant Bait Provides Long-term Ant Control, Both Indoors and Outdoors
Ants are masters of waiting out the cold winter season, hunkering down in clusters to maintain their body heat and huddling protectively around the queen to shelter their population’s lifeline. Now, the warmer days of spring are in full swing and legions of ants are back at work, in search of food. TERRO®, a leader in ant and pest control products, recommends controlling these hungry armies of ants with liquid ant bait, both indoors and outdoors.
“For effective, long-term control of common sweet-eating ants, you need to bait the worker ants – the ants you see marching in and around your house – with TERRO® Liquid Ant Baits,” says Stew Clark, Director of Research at TERRO®. “As worker ants forage for food, they are drawn to the sweet liquid in the ant bait. While the active ingredient in the bait will ultimately kill the ants by interfering with their digestive system, it works slowly enough that the ants have time to get back and share the lethal bait with the rest of the colony, including the queen. This is the only way to kill the ants you see – and the thousands you don’t.”Since this is a bait product, you’re going to see more ants at first – lots more. As ants find the liquid bait, they consume it and drop what is called a “trail pheromone” back to the nest that lets all the other worker ants know where a food supply has been found.
So, why bait with liquid? The worker ants you encounter are all adult ants and their anatomy is such that they have no “chewing” mouth parts. The easiest way for them to carry food back to the colony is to drink, drink, drink! And once they have returned to the nest, they can immediately share the liquid with the other ants. If the bait is in a paste or gel form, it would need to go through further processing before it could be shared and take effect.
Since most indoor ant infestations are linked to a colony outside, Clark also recommends setting up an outdoor home barrier. “Treating the perimeter of your house with a TERRO® ant bait product provides an added line of defense against unwanted insects entering your home,” explains Clark.
TERRO® Outdoor Liquid Ant Baits Stakes work just like their indoor counterparts, attracting worker ants with the sweet liquid inside. The sweet liquid they will eventually share with the rest of the colony. When searching for ants outside the home, look for “ant highways” or foraging trails. These trails are simply a line of marching ants that leads from their home to yours. Often, these trails are most active during the morning or evening. Walk around the perimeter of your house and carefully check for ant trails. Pull back the garden mulch, turn over rocks and look under pieces of wood to locate activity. Inspect potential entry points including windows, doors, exhaust vents, faucets and sliding glass doors. Also check for ants trailing up the sides of your home and along gutters.
“The key to successfully using any TERRO® ant bait product is to make sure the ants find the bait, eat it, and take it back to the nest to feed to the rest of the colony,” says Clark. “Be sure to eliminate all other food sources in the area. This will ensure the ants aren’t tempted to eat anything but the bait.”
Smaller ant infestations can usually be controlled within 24-48 hours. However, where there are very large or multiple colonies in the problem area, it can take up to 10 days to achieve complete control.
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