What to do when you have ants in your home

Ants are a common pest here in the Phoenix area. In some Valley neighborhoods, underground ant settlements may be older and larger than the housing tracts built on top of them. This means that ant infestation, and re-infestation, may be common—occurring as often as every summer. Ants are able to squeeze into any space and quickly take over your home. When an ant army invades, you need professional pest control services from our team here at KY-KO Pest Prevention.

In this article, we’ll outline the many reasons you should enlist the aid of a pest control professional to help with your ant problem. To schedule pest control services here in the Valley, contact our team online, or give us a call.

Figure out why you have an ant problem

Once you see ants in your home, it’s likely they’ll keep coming back unless you destroy the nest. Your home represents food and water to these pests.

Getting rid of ants isn’t always a simple process. You’ll want to know what species of ant you are dealing with. Carpenter ants can be mistaken for termites. Both like to nest in the wood, but it takes a different approach to exterminate the colony.

Those tiny black ants are looking for water and food sources, but rarely nest inside the home.

The ants you see are the ones who leave the nest. The queen is the one who lays the eggs. She never leaves the nest. If you only treat the ants you see, you never treat the source. Don’t spray the ants you see but trail them back to their colony. These worker ants are your ticket to getting the queen.

Use the worker ants to take ant bait back to the colony. You might be inclined to clean up the ant trail, but don’t do that. Use the trail to lead ants to your bait. Clean up any other food sources that the ants might use. The workers take the bait back to the colony which then eliminates the queen.

Store-bought sprays aren’t going to work

Ants cannot be defeated by store-bought remedies. First, spraying for ants is a relatively ineffective way to deal with them: in most cases, as long as the queen survives deep underground, the ant infestation is nowhere near to over. Pesticides won’t carry that deep into ant tunnels. Even if all the ants on the surface in your home are killed, a new group will rise from deep in the ant burrows to re-infest your home, starting the whole problem all over again.

You need an all-around strategy

The pest technicians at KY-KO can help you craft a winning strategy in your war against the ant invaders. First, we’ll help you figure out how to better deny the ants access to water and food—the two things they’re after in your home. Second, we’ll develop a solution that works for your home to attempt to kill the queen. In many cases, this involves a slow-acting food poison that the ants carry back to the queen deep in the burrows, but then kills her after she eats it. No queen, no more ants.

Finally, we’ll help you block obvious ant pathways into your home, preventing a new queen and more ants from returning for more next summer.

Save money and hassle

Dealing with ants is no joke: we’ve seen families literally chased out of their homes by an infestation. In such cases, you want help from the professionals—fast. That’s why KY-KO Pest Prevention is the right choice to deal with an ant infestation. We can save you the hassle and headache of having to fight ants by yourself. Because we know what works and what doesn’t, you don’t have to waste money on a trial-and-error of many different pesticides and so-called “ant-killers.”

Trust in our Owner’s Pride Guarantee

We back our pest control services with our 100% satisfaction guarantee. You can rest easy knowing that our team will handle the ant problem in a fast and effective manner. Our certified technicians are ready to tackle any ant issue—no matter how severe the infestation is.

Don’t let ants ruin your summer

Dealing with ants and other pests can get overwhelming, but you don’t have to tackle the problem on your own. To learn more about how to remedy your ant infestation, contact our team here at KY-KO Pest Prevention. Don’t forget: we offer free pest inspections here in Phoenix!