With spring on its way, this doesn’t just mean warmer weather. It means that pests will be more active. We are already getting calls about ants. In the spring, they start to look for places where they can expand their colony. They require protection if it freezes, as well as sources of food and water nearby. This means that ants often like to live near humans. They can sneak into buildings in search of crumbs in your kitchen or pantry. If they find food, they can leave a scent trail telling the other colony members how to find it.

If you see even just a couple of ants in your home, it could mean you have a big problem. Ants are very difficult to get rid of without professional help. We often help people control odorous house ants (also known as sugar ants). They may use plants and trees in your yard as shelter.

Aside from being drawn to human structures in search of food, ants may enter buildings to seek shelter from spring rains. Obviously, ants are very small, and rain could easily drown them. Another reason that they might try to live in your home is if they are expanding their nest. If they lost the plants they were using for shelter in your yard, they might choose to live in your home for protection instead. They won’t want to leave once they decide your home is a prime location.

Odorous house ants are named as such because of the smelly fluid that they excrete to ward off other bugs. If one of these ants gets squished, it smells sickly sweet, like coconut or ammonia. Their other common name, sugar ants, is because of their preferred diet of sweet foods. Unfortunately, this means that human snacks are very appealing to them.

An important fact about odorous house ants is that they are a polygenic species, meaning each colony can have multiple queens. This allows their colonies to grow in size at a staggering rate. Each colony may have up to 10,000 worker ants. Odorous house ants are an adaptable species and can build colonies pretty much anywhere, such as in leaf piles, kitchen drawers, and even wall voids. These ants are also nomadic and can move their whole colony to look for resources.

The most powerful asset that odorous house ants have is their ability to split the colony. If they feel under threat, they can split into multiple different colonies, which is known as budding. Each of the colony’s queens could take part of the colony and take them in a separate direction. When they double down, it’s even harder to eliminate them.

This often happens when people try to spray the ants on their own. This alerts the colony that it is in danger, triggering a split that could spread the infestation to multiple areas of your home without you even knowing. Instead of just having ants in your kitchen, you could suddenly have them in your living room and bathroom. Your odorous ant problem isn’t going away on its own and then coming back—it never stopped in the first place.

You don’t want to share your home or building space with ants. Professional, consistent, thorough efforts are required to get rid of odorous house ants properly, and an experienced pest control company that uses effective techniques and tools is extremely important to success.

The first step of Rambo Total Pest Control’s approach to ant control is to do an inspection of the property. We identify which type of ant we’re dealing with, which is important for proper control. We will also find their food sources, and see what conditions on your property could be benefiting the ants.

The pest control techniques we use will depend on the type of ant as well as your particular situation. One of our methods is to put a double band of protection around your building. This is able to stop the current infestation in its tracks and keep a new one from happening. The inner band goes along the exterior foundation of the building. For this, we use products that don’t repel the ants and are transferable. The ants can’t detect it, so they unknowingly take it throughout the whole colony. The outer band of protection is several feet out from your home’s perimeter, made of materials that repel ants to keep them from invading your home again.

Our pest control technicians place bait traps inside the building, so there isn’t a need to leave your home or work while control is taking place. The products we use are effective at getting rid of ants inside homes and workplaces. Our combined methods for inside and outside will take a couple of weeks to be fully effective.

After that, it’s important to take preventative measures. Although you are noticing ants more in the spring, infestations can happen at any time of the year. We will resolve the problem quickly and then take measures to keep ants and other pests from coming back.

We recommend regular inspections to keep your home free of ants. Reach out to Rambo Total Pest Control for odorous house ant control services in Puyallup or anywhere else in the Puget Sound area. Get the issue taken care of now before it gets worse! You should be able to enjoy your home and property in the warm months without worrying about ants.