QHow do I stop an invasion of teeny-tiny ants, the kind that parade across my kitchen counters and drive me crazy?
AFirst, forget about grabbing a can of ant spray and dousing your kitchen counter. Besides the obvious health and safety risks, it won't solve your problem.
Like honeybees, ants are social creatures with a well-defined caste system. The ants crawling around in your kitchen are workers assigned to gather food, which they carry back to a nest that may have many thousands of other worker ants, as well as one or more queens and masses of white, grub-like larvae. You can kill a few foragers, but the colony will just send out more. If even 1 percent of the workers survive, it may be enough to keep a queen and her brood going strong.
And if your ants are a species known as pharaoh ants (small, yellow and about 1/16 -inch long), spraying may actually make your problem worse. If a pharaoh colony senses danger -- and ant spray definitely qualifies -- it may "bud," or establish new satellite colonies. Then, instead of having to deal with ants coming from one nest, you'll be coping with several.
A three-step process -- or, if you're lucky, two -- is much more likely to succeed.
First, try to eliminate all possible food sources within your house. Some ants prefer sweets, others go for meat and grease, and ants sometimes change their preferences. So you pretty much need to clean up everything, especially if it's sticky. Besides wiping away spills, cleaning up after each meal and keeping opened food in the refrigerator or in containers with tight-fitting lids, you should rinse out soda cans and other food packaging before you put it in the trash or a recycling bin. Empty trash containers and clean pet food bowls frequently.
Second, do what you can to prevent ants from entering your home. Besides plugging all obvious holes and caulking around window and door trim, attend to less obvious spots, such as openings where pipes and electrical wires enter your house and any gaps under the lower rail of a sliding glass door. Most house ants common in the Washington area establish scent trails to guide worker ants between the nest and food. If you follow a trail, you may be able to find where they are getting in. Ants are particularly fond of traveling along a wire or pipe. Outside, trim back vegetation near the house, particularly plants that harbor aphids, which secrete a sweet substance that ants love. If you have these plants, keep ants out of the branches by banding the trunks with a sticky substance, such as Tree Tanglefoot Pest Barrier ( http://www.tanglefoot.com ).
Also fix any moisture problems -- a step that may be enough to eliminate one of this area's common house ants, the acrobat ant, a 1/8 -inch-long, shiny black or reddish brown creature named for the way it raises its abdomen over its head when spooked. Acrobat ants don't form lines of foragers, but they do nest almost exclusively in moist wood and generally leave if the area dries out.
Fastidious housekeeping and tightening up the exterior of your house may solve your ant problem. If not, move on to stage three: eliminating the ants' nest or nests.
Most house ants nest in soil, although some also establish homes in wall cavities, the soil around potted plants, appliances, insulation and other places where you might not think to look. If you're lucky, you can follow the ant trail and find the nest. If it's in a potted plant, a box of old clothes or other objects that you can pick up and move, submerge the container in slightly soapy water for 20 minutes.
Otherwise, your best bet is to use ant bait, which usually works even if you can't find the nest. Baits, which are sold in grocery and hardware stores, are available as granules and as bait stations -- tamper-resistant packages that incorporate both an attractant and a slow-acting insecticide. Bait stations are the safest way to set out pesticide because you don't touch the ingredients or disperse it across your house or yard. Unlike ant sprays, which repel ants and kill on contact (and often contain pesticides that are more environmentally harmful), baits are designed to work slowly and insidiously, so that the worker ants will carry bits of the poison back to the nest and share it with others in the colony. If the baits acted quickly, the ants would sense a problem and stop taking it.
Some baits are sweet, while others contain protein. Buy one and see whether the ants stream in to feed on it; if not, switch to a different kind. When you find a product they like, buy enough so you can place bait stations along all ant trails, every 10 to 20 feet around the outside of the house, and near nests, if you can find them. Don't put bait stations where children or pets might pick them up.
Ants won't eat the bait if they find better food nearby, but if you're already being fastidious about cleanliness, you shouldn't have to worry. At first, you may see more ants than usual as they come to feed on the bait. In a day or two, their numbers should decline. Some types of pesticide may take a week to work. If the bait no longer seems to be working but you still have ants, switch to another brand.
Be especially careful not to use ant spray once you have set out bait stations. The spray's smell will scare ants away from the bait.
Using enough bait stations is especially important if you suspect you have a species of ant whose colonies bud. Besides pharaoh ants, the other main type to worry about in this area is the odorous house ant, which establishes satellite colonies when one becomes too large. Odorous house ants are about 1/8 -inch long and dark brown to black (a description that fits many species). Crush one or two with a fingernail and sniff. Odorous house ants have a smell that's been described as that of coconuts -- or rotten coconuts.
If none of this works, you may need to call a pest-control company, which can use stronger or longer-lasting insecticides than the ones found in the bait stations you can buy.
