Why are there ants in the house?

Ants often go inside to find food or build a nest. Even just a little bit of food, like a sample of leftovers from domestic pets, can attract ant colonies.

Ants are one of the most successful insects on Earth and have more than 13,000 species of ants. They live almost everywhere except Antarctica, the remote regions of the Arctic and some small islands.

Although ants are everywhere, people are surprised and even panicked when they see a long line of ants crawling in the kitchen. In this case, will you immediately get an insect spray or find a way to live with ants?

Ants often enter the house more in the hot season.

What are ants doing in the house?

Ants are part of an army of natural cleaners: they find and take away leftovers around them . The problem is sometimes people don't need them to help.

You may have noticed that ants appear more often indoors during the summer , the main reason for this is that most insects are more active when it is warm . Sometimes ants come in to find water, especially in the dry season. In this case, you will see them in the bathroom or other wet areas of the house. Heavy rains can also flood ant nests and force them to find new housing near buildings, such as yours.

Cooperation issues

Ants are highly community animals , they live in groups of hundreds or even millions. Their brain is very small, sometimes smaller than a grain of sand. So why are they so smart that they come into your house and find food? That's because ants are masters of cooperation.

Watch the ants line up toward the drop of honey on the kitchen counter. When the worker ants find a good piece of food, they leave a signal with a tiny drop of pheromone on the ground, continuing to leave such traces of pheromone until they reach the nest. As long as an ant finds food and leaves such a trace, there will be hundreds of other traces coming to the food source.

How to have no ants in the house?

The first thing you need to do to treat ants indoors is to make sure they don't have access to food. Store food in an airtight container, clean the back of the refrigerator, in the oven, don't leave pet food leftovers in the bowl for too long, the trash should also have a tight lid, and generally don't leave food unattended. cover. This is easy to say but actually not easy to do.

If you see ants in a line, wipe the path of the ant with vinegar or detergent to remove all chemicals traces that ants leave as a signal.

Prevent ants from entering the house by sealing all cracks and holes in the wall. This also makes it impossible for them to nest inside the wall. If the above methods do not work, you can use bait with ant killer.

Wiping the surface with vinegar can remove the chemical stains left by ants as a sign for the herd to move in a row.

Ants can kill other insects

If you are unable to handle the ants in your home, consult an insect treatment unit, not using ants yourself indiscriminately. DIY methods are less likely to work because ants live mainly in confined spaces (such as under floors or in walls). You can kill a few worker ants but not necessarily kill the whole group.

If you (or a unit with expertise in handling insects) use insecticides, avoid this medication outside your home and remember to choose ants only. Most insecticides are broad-spectrum chemicals that can kill many insects, including garden and house species such as ladybirds, mantises and parasitic bees.

To get rid of a whole colony, you may take time, especially if the colony is large. Some species of ants live in groups so it will be harder to kill them.

Ants know how to resist

In most ants, the queen is the only one that can produce worker ants. So to kill the whole herd, you need to kill the ants.

But some species of ants, such as Temnothorax albipennis, have evolved to develop ways to protect queen ants and larvae from poisonous food.

Some worker ants stay in the nest and take food from other ants to bring back and swallow the food in the stomach to store, then vomit again when you are hungry. Because these 'storekeepers' ants collect and mix the food brought by many others, the food is guaranteed to be completely eliminated, if available, before being fed to the queen. They also act as ants that test for poison, if the food is poisoned, they will die and so the queen will not eat this food.

Humans need ants

Remember that ants are also beneficial predators, such as ants eating cockroaches. Ants also play an important role in sowing seeds of plants and clearing garbage in the environment.

Ants are a natural and important part of urban ecosystems. So if we want to protect our precious biodiversity, then consider it before killing the ants, even if they seem to be very stubborn to attack the kitchen or ruin your picnic.

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