How to kill sugar ants fast!

The Extremely Annoying Sugar Ant

In my line of work, sugar ants are the most common pest issue that I deal with.  They don’t do any damage and they cannot hurt you, but they sure can be greatly annoying.  Just about every home is going to be invaded by these pesky insects eventually and it is better to learn now how you are going to deal with them until waiting until they are heavily upon you.

For starters, sugar ants are a type soil ant (meaning that they come from the ground, of course).  By the time that you see them in your house, they have probably left their cozy home in the ground and made a cozier home inside your walls.  But, if you want to stop these guys from getting in there in the first place, you can do a preventative exterior spray around your home.  If you are going to spray it yourself, I would recommend Ortho Home Defense, but if you want to bring out the big guns, I would recommend me (Healthy Homes Pest Control).

If you were not lucky enough to stop the problem before it started, then that would explain why you are reading an article titled “Getting rid of sugar ants fast!”, so let me get down to the basics.
First, sugar ants only want 3 things from your home and those are warmth, food and water.  You want to eliminate as much of these as you can.  We will go ahead and give them warmth because you kind of like that about your home too, but eliminate any food and water.  Do a deep clean on your kitchen and search any sticky sweet left overs that they might be going for.  Make sure your food in your pantry is tightly sealed and be sure to clean any grease around your stove and oven.  When you use your sink, wipe up the residual water.  Sometimes these two steps can cause them to move on to another home…  But, not usually.

There are a few things that you can do that will actually be counter productive that you would not expect.  First, any over the counter bug spray will contain a repellent and these will cause havoc in the sugar ant nest.  Basically a repellent causes the queen to panic and start reproducing at a higher rate because she thinks the nest is under attack.  If you have ever sprayed ants with Raid and killed them and then found even more ants a few weeks later, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  Secondly, it is helpful to avoid any citrus based cleaning products because they are drawn to that.
In my opinion, the best approach to treating these nuisance pests is baiting, baiting and baiting.  All those ants that you see swarming your counter are looking for food to bring back to the nest and a good bait can be very effective.  Again, I can bring the more effective stuff, but if you want to go it alone first, I would recommend Maxforce because it has an active ingredient of Fipronil which works awesome.  It is hard to find, but here is a link to it on Amazon.

Once you have your kitchen clean and dry and have your bait out, you want to just let them do their thing.  Believe it or not, you do not want to kill them.  It is better if they just take the bait back to the colony and die off that way.  Lastly, if you find trails leading to a food source that you do not want them in, you can wipe the trails off with Windex.  This will erase their pheromone trails and hopefully cause them to make new trails leading to the bait.

If all else fails, you can always call me at Healthy Homes Pest Control.  Even if you live out of state and I could not possibly treat your home, I would still be more than happy to give you some more advice.  Good luck!

See this article on Squidoo.com!