If an ant colony infested your home and caused damage, home insurance won’t cover it. To clarify, your standard home insurance won’t, which means you’d need to pay for extended coverage. Most people aren’t even aware of this, their insurance is probably expensive enough.
Dealing with any pest infestation is tough to do alone, especially insects like ants. If you have ants in the wall, what can you really do to get the best of them? Do you try to starve them out by becoming a clean-freak?
Can you really outlast an entire ant colony who can live off of rainwater and leaves outside? Chances are you’ll probably waste a lot of money trying to do it yourself. Ant service shouldn’t get pushed off as a last resort.
Let’s understand exactly what an ant infestation involves before convincing yourself otherwise.
an ideal environment
When ants are on the move to go set up their new colony, they’re looking for the basics. They need a place that is close enough to a water source and food source. For your home, it probably already meets those two criteria.
If an ant was able to scout your place out and find an easy access point into your wall, they’re in business. They don’t necessarily need a home that is dirty, filled with crumbs, and etc. That would only increase the odds of an infestation.
This is all assuming we’re talking about regular old’ ants, not the type that specifically targets wood-framed homes.
who’s knocking at your door?
You’ve got an ant infestation and you want to kill it now. Before you grab the flamethrower, you need to know what you’re dealing with. Ants of all types are a threat to homeowners, some more than others.
Do you have tiny black ants or big ones? The common “sugar ants” are the most harmless of ant species, but are you sure they are? Take a closer look, they might be a species called the “acrobat ant” which burrows in homes.
If they’re not those ants, they might be your worst nightmare as a homeowner: carpenter ants. These ants create huge nests in wood, usually where wood is already damaged or moist. That means eliminating their colony is a lot more than cleaning the house and laying down the bait.
Only experienced pest control services can locate, eliminate, and fill these gaps. If you don’t take a thorough approach when dealing with ants in a wall, there’s no stopping them from coming back.
defense is the best offense
The war against ants is often long and expensive. Ant colonies can grow very fast and are often hard to measure. Rather than allowing things to get to the point of expensive ant extermination, you need a plan.
With a proper maintenance schedule, you can defend your home from ants by creating an unwelcoming environment. It starts with home maintenance and upkeep. If your foundation is secure and sealed up, your house won’t breathe out any indicators for entrances.
Lastly, you’ll have a yard full of deterrents in place in the form of traps and chemical barriers. Ants are very sensitive to chemical trails. The key is not to soak the ground in poison, but to make things extremely unpleasant for the scouting ants.
why diy solutions don’t work
You may have been thinking to yourself while reading this “I can just buy this stuff at Home Depot.” You could do that, but you’re not going to get commercial-grade pest control. It’s like rolling the dice on pest control formulas, hoping they are effective and won’t kill your grass.
Plus, these days ant extermination companies are using safer and more effective products. You don’t want to have some Joe Schmoe spraying poison inside your walls and have your family breathing it for years after. Retail pest products are not made to do much preventing, either.
Even if you spray down your perimeter every season, there’s no guarantee that it will work. Some colonies can get really creative with how they enter the home. We’re talking tree-hopping, swarm-dropping, limousine-driving son-of-a-guns.
Moral of the story: you’re not going to out-wit ants without years of experience.
post-colony collapse
If you’ve managed to locate and destroy the ant colony, can you guarantee that they won’t return? Did you kill the queen ant? What, you mean you didn’t see her?
Welcome to pest control 101: if you don’t kill the queen, you lost. Sure, you may have set back her nesting a few months, but she’ll be back. The funny thing is, the queen isn’t much of a runner anyway.
That’s right, if you opened that wall up, “destroyed” the colony, and closed it back: you’re doing it all over again if she’s not dead. Colonies can sprawl and take all sorts of shapes, especially if it’s a carpenter ant colony. You’ll need a professional to flush out those suckers and fill in all the entrances.
Ants are already annoying as it is, and downright infuriating once you’ve spent $100s on home products.
the best natural ant service
We hope you heed our word of caution in this article. Ants in walls is a tough and frustrating situation. It can take a while to even realize that they are in your walls.
This is why it is so important to already have a reliable ant service company taking care of your home. They will know what to look for when it comes to your home’s defenses. If you do happen to have an ant colony that has already moved in, then they can act fast and prevent further damage.
Contact us for a free consultation. We only use pet-friendly, family-friendly, and odor-free products. There’s no control like Natura Pest Control.
