How Can I Keep Ants Out of My House?

At some point in mid-summer, it just happens. You walk into your kitchen… and there are ants crawling everywhere. “What’s up with all these ants in my kitchen,”  you wonder. Read on to discover why your home has been invaded by the crawly pests, and to learn what you can do about them.

Like most animals, including us, ants seek out food and water. But unlike us, they don’t exactly have an ant supermarket at their disposal. They have to hunt for their food, and that often means invading places that have an abundance of food… Like our houses. If you store food insufficiently, where ants can get to it, they’re happy to sneak into your home and discover it. Then they go back home to the colony and tell their friends, and soon enough you have a trail of ants carrying last night’s dinner crumbs through cracks in the floorboards.

The same goes for water. If you have a dripping pipe or pooling moisture anywhere in or around your home, ants will come to hang out. They want to live and build their homes near readily available water.

Remember that ants tend to send out scouts to look for food and water nearby their colonies. So if you’ve left debris piles or other great nesting materials in your yard, you probably have an ant colony nearby. Their natural next step is to invade your home.

And of course, ants will take the path of least resistance. Don’t we all? So if your windows and doors are poorly sealed, or there are other easily accessible entrances to your home, they’re more likely to set up house close to you. They won’t try so hard to get into the neighbors’ houses, if those are sealed up as tightly as Fort Knox.

Clearly, the best solution to your ant problem is to clean up your yard, keep the kitchen clean, don’t allow snacking outside of designated dining areas, and to check your home for leaks or other sources of pooling water. But sometimes you’ll simply struggle with ants no matter what you do. In that case, give us a call, and we can offer professional pest control services to get those obnoxious insects out of your house fast.