Ants in your kitchen is a sign of spring
Have you noticed that when the temperatures start to rise at the end of winter, you start to see ants crawling all over your kitchen counter? Spring is almost here, and those warm temperatures are waking up the colony that has stayed snug and cozy within your walls during the cold months.
Your food supplies are low and it’s time for the foragers to go harvesting.
At first you pay little attention to the ants because you only see three or four of them crawling around the edges of the counter. Normally you just squash the ones you see and continue doing what you were doing. A couple of days later, he notices movement again, and suddenly sees a dozen or more ants moving back and forth along the wall of the counter.
After a few days, you walk into your kitchen and there is a group of ants in one spot on your counter. You look closer and see that they’ve found some breadcrumbs, and they’ve formed lines of ants, one line crawling toward the little pile of crumbs, and another line carrying those crumbs toward the hole they’re coming out of. Wall.
As the days turn into weeks, you see more and more ants, and now they’re really starting to get on your nerves because they’re all over your counter, they’re in your cabinets, and they’re attacking your food containers.
Have you ever wondered how ants find those bits of food?
Most of the time you see a crowd of ants swarming over something you can’t even see. You know it’s food of some kind that you spilled or dropped, and didn’t clean up just because it’s so small you didn’t see it.
Ants are experts at sniffing out those little spills and droppings. When it’s time to rebuild their food supplies, some scouts go out looking for something edible. The explorers leave a scented trail that shows them the way home.
Those trails look a lot like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumb trail in the woods, only better because birds eat Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs (and ants find them), while ant trails have a smell. that the ants follow. That smell doesn’t go away as fast as breadcrumbs.
So the scouts leave their scented trail on their way to find a food source. That trail tells the explorer where home is.
When the explorer finds food, he grabs a load and heads back along the path he left on the way to the food. As he carries the food back to the colony, he leaves a new trail. This trail has a different scent, a scent that the worker ants follow to the food so they can transport it back to the colony.
That’s all interesting enough, isn’t it, but it doesn’t solve your problem of ants on your counter, in your cabinets, and attacking your food, does it?
What pest control techniques can you use to do that?
If you don’t want those ants bothering you all spring and summer, your first step is to clean up all those spills and droppings where you find ants gathering. It doesn’t matter if you see something in that place, if the ants travel, huddle and crawl away from a certain area the same way they came, there is something edible there.
Clean that spot with soap and hot water to get rid of any food the ants have found there.
Next, use soap and hot water to wash off your scented trail. Clean along the path where you see two lines of ants crawling. It’s where the lines of ants go in opposite directions.
If you clean up their trail, the ants at the food source get lost and can’t find their way home.
And the ants leaving the colony have no way of finding their way to where the food was.
Keep doing those things and you’ll force the ants to look elsewhere for food. You won’t get rid of the ants, but they won’t send a huge invasive force into your kitchen. As long as you keep things clean, all you’ll see are those occasional explorers.