Ants

Where you see one ant you are bound to see more. Their small size allows them to easily make their way into your home. Getting in through openings around water and electrical lines and cracks and crevices around the foundation. The scout ants, whose jobs is to locate food for the colony, will search your home high and low for any source of food. This could be sugar, meats, fruit or anything else that is available. One specific species of ant can cause great havoc and stress in your home.

Argentine ants are the biggest pest ant nuisance in the Bay Area and they are also detrimental to beneficial and native pollinators. They are a non-native invasive species of ant that has taken a few hundred years to form a supercolony that stretches 600 miles down the west coast.

Because we will never get rid of all of these ants, the next best solution is prevention by making your home less desirable to them.

Below is a profile of Argentine ants and ways to prevent this pest from infesting your home.

ANT

Identification
  • 1/8th inch long and brown to black in color and shiny in appearance.
  • Queen Argentine ants are larger, 1/6 to 1/4th inches long.
Behavior
  • Forage when temperatures range between 50° to 86°F.
  • Trails typically follow structural paths like driveways, along building edges, baseboards, cracks between tiles and along counter edges.
  • Once they have found a viable food source they will often set up a satellite colony near the food source.
  • Omnivores, and the type of food they consume depends on the time of year
  • Sucrose is a primary staple of their diets and 99% of the food brought back to the nest is in liquid form - honeydew from aphids
Habitat
  • Nest in both exposed and covered soil
  • Nests can be found under stones, logs, debris, under cement slabs and potted plants
  • Can harbor in bricks, piles of lumber, wall voids, insulation, cracks and crevices, moist conditions like bathtubs, under carpets, and even under debris like piles of boxes

Life Cycle

(Gradual or Incomplete Metamorphosis)
  • Colonies often have multiple queens producing eggs
  • Egg production peaks in the spring and summer months
  • Eggs take an average of 28 days to hatch
  • From egg to adult takes about 74 days

Seasonality
  • Spike in population from March to October and then a mass die-off in November

Favorable Conditions
  • 50-86 Degrees
  • Lushly landscaped areas
  • Aphid infested bushes
  • Ripened fruit on trees

Health Concerns
  • No known health threats to the human population and are considered a nuisance pest
  • Can infest food products, which is mostly a concern of economics more than health

Signs of an infestation
  • Ant trails on the interior of the home
  • Ant nests - small hills and mounds of dirt

 

Things You Can Do Before We Get There

  • Clean up spilled food and drinks.
  • Store food in sealed containers and dispose of waste properly.
  • Be sure to rinse out recyclables.
  • Regularly clean the inside of your garbage and recycling cans.
  • Spray ant trails with a soapy water solution (10 parts water, 1 part soap) and wipe up to remove