Have you ever gotten ants in your house? If you have, you probably just felt yourself involuntarily grimace. An ant infestation can seem infinite, especially if your house is not properly protected against ants and is possibly even actively inviting them inside. This article will provide a brief overview of the three most common nuisance ants in the USA (odorous house ant, carpenter ant, pavement ant), determine what prompts each type of ant to invade a home, and offer some tips for getting rid of an ant—including when it is time to throw in the towel and call a professional.
Odorous House Ant
Unsurprisingly, a creature with “odorous” in its name gives off a rather pungent smell. However, living house ants do not have a particular smell. When an odorous house ant is crushed and killed, that’s when the odor is released. What it smells like tends to vary from person to person, though all of the reported scents are rather unpleasant. Bleu cheese and rotting coconut tend to be common scent descriptors, but other people report the smell as highly chemical, likening it to nail polish remover. If a colony establishes itself in your home, you run the risk of every step turning into a very stinky surprise.
Odorous house ants tend to invade homes due to resource scarcity or due to rain destroying their outdoor nests. Due to rain being a motivating factor, spring and summer are primarily when house ants mount assaults on human residences. They’re very crafty and will alert members of their colony whenever a small entrance is found. This can be something like a crack in your home’s foundation or a grab in a window, but damaged utility piping can also provide an odorous house ant colony with an express line into your home.
House ants are also strongly food oriented. In the wild, they primarily seek out honeydew, which is secreted primarily by aphids. If the honeydew production in an area cannot support all of the currently existing colonies, one or more colonies will be forced to leave in search of other food sources. Unfortunately, many of the processed sugars found in human pantries and fridges are very attractive to ants.
Carpenter Ant
Carpenter ants have many things in common with the odorous house ant (they’re both ants after all), but there are some key differences. First, carpenter ants do not scent bomb you when they die, which is a welcome relief. They’re also much larger than house ants, which restricts the amount of feasible entry points into a home.
Habitat motivation is the primary reason for a carpenter ant colony to invade a home. When carpenter ants are outdoors, they live in logs or hollow trees, and they love dead and rotting wood. Wet weather can cause wood rot in homes, which inevitably attracts carpenter ants. Even if the wood does not rot, it can soften, which then makes it easier for carpenter ants to excavate.
Carpenter ants are not termites; they do not eat wood. Instead, they excavate it to build nests, discarding the wood they chew up and moving it out of the increasingly hollow nest. They have largely identical diets to odorous house ants, with a strong preference for sugars and proteins when scavenging in human kitchens.
Pavement Ant
Pavement ants are similar in size to the odorous house ant, if not slightly bigger on average. Both species are substantially smaller than the carpenter ant. Their name comes from the pavement ants’ preference to nest under cement, foundations, or stones. Because of this, pavement ant colonies can be prevalent pests around a home.
Once a pavement ant colony has made its home under your home, they invade in a similar manner to odorous house ants due to their similar size. Foundation cracks are the equivalent of an all-access pass for a pavement ant; any small opening can be exploited. When pavement ants enter a house, they have a tendency to move in orderly trails along baseboards and siding, making them easy to spot.
When it comes to raiding your kitchen, pavement ants love sugar just as much as the previous two species. Still, they’re much more omnivorous and will eat any type of food or food residue without much distinction, which makes them especially annoying to remove from a kitchen.
Ant Control
So you’ve noticed ants in your house. What now? Thankfully, this is a common issue, and multiple products are on the market that can kill off invading ants. However, before you start to spray, take some measures to prevent another colony from invading in the future.
- Caulk entry points, especially for odorous house ants and pavement ants.
- For carpenter ants, check for damp wood. This can come from a leaky roof or plumbing system.
- Make sure that spills are promptly cleaned, especially sugary spills like juice.
- Regularly empty trash, especially if food scraps or waste are currently inside.
A simple way to kill an ant population is to create sugar water then mix it with borax. Ants will take the toxic sugar water back to their nest, where the population will die. Just make sure that any children or pets don’t try to drink the ant bait!
Looking for a professional product? Check out ARBICO Organic’s selection of ant control products.
If you try spraying ants yourself or using the sugar water trick and don’t notice a drastic decrease in ants within a week, it’s time to call a professional. The colony is likely too large and has expanded to multiple nests, or, in the case of the odorous house ant, has multiple queens. A simple Google search will likely return multiple options in your area.
Here’s to an ant-free home.
ARBICO Organics was founded in 1979 in Arizona. Over 40 years later, ARBICO Organics continues to produce innovative means of natural biological pest control for a wide range of consumers. Their product lineup ranges from environmentally friendly solutions to common garden and home pests to biological powerhouses used in professional agriculture and at racetracks.
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