Why You May Have a Sudden Influx of Ants in Your Home

Are you wondering why ants have suddenly infested your home when such a thing had never happened before? Read on and discover some of the key reasons that could explain why you may have a sudden influx of ants in your home.

Soil Disturbances

The ants may have invaded your home simply because someone dug up your yard or the neighboring properties during a landscaping or construction project. That soil disturbance could have exposed the ant nests and caused them to move in search of new homes. Your home may provide temporary shelter for them, especially if the weather is very cold or hot. Stockton pest control companies get many homeowner calls during summer for this reason.

Availability of Food Sources

Worker ants are always on the hunt for food and water. Scouts move in all directions from the ant nest and leave a chemical trail to any food that they find as they forage. Other ants follow that trail to any food discovered, and you will soon have a swarm of them in your house.

Check your home for any dropped crumbs or dirty plates piled in the kitchen sink. Clean all countertops and any surfaces that you use when cooking or having a meal. This will eliminate the sources of the odors that attract the ants into your home.

Gaps in the House’s Envelop

Ants can also appear suddenly in your home if there are gaps through which the ants can pass. For example, the weather stripping on the windows or doors may have become worn and left tiny openings once the windows or doors are closed. These tiny gaps can be exploited by the worker ants that are foraging for food and water.

Check your Central Valley home thoroughly and seal any gaps you notice so that you can prevent these pests from getting into your house.

Overgrown Vegetation

The sudden appearance of ants inside your Modesto home may be a result of the overgrown bushes and shrubs outside the house. That overgrown vegetation may start touching the exterior walls of the house.

Ants will use the vegetation as a bridge to get into the house through any openings that are above ground level, such as through an open window. It is therefore advisable for you to trim all the bushes and shrubs close to your house so that the ants cannot use that vegetation as a bridge to enter your home.

Improper Food Storage

Ants may appear suddenly in your house if you aren’t storing food properly. For example, you may be leaving food in open containers in your pantry. The smells from the food will be beacons to ants outside the home.

Make sure that you keep all food in airtight containers so that ants cannot pick up the smells coming from that improperly stored food.

Improper Ant Treatment

Some people may try to use sprays to get rid of the ants they have observed on the property. The worker ants that survive that spray will carry the chemical signature of those substances to the colony’s nest when they return after foraging.

The queen can detect that scent and trigger colony “budding”, a process through which the ants break up into several colonies that move to different sites in order to survive the chemical attack to which they were exposed.

One of those mini-colonies may have found its way into your home when the signal to “bud” was initiated by the queen ant after a neighbor sprayed the ants that he or she saw.

Combating a sudden influx of ants in your house requires a two-pronged approach. One entails removing all entry points ant the things that attract the ants to the home. The second prong covers eliminating the current ant population by using the most appropriate methods, such as ant baits. Contact us at AAI Pest Control for a cost-effective solution to any ant problem in the Central Valley.