The ants in the apartment are not just discomfort for the household. Often they bring with them bacteria that are dangerous to human health. Crawling around wherever they like, they quickly and widely spread various diseases, spoil the food, which causes people a lot of trouble.
The reasons for the appearance of ants in the apartment
In order to begin an effective struggle, you first need to understand the reasons why ants in an apartment are planted. Basically, they come to our house, if:
- The cold season comes on the street. Like any warm-blooded insects, the ants in the apartment are looking for a warm haven for a while cool.
- You are not careful enough to keep order in the kitchen and in other rooms. The abundance of food, especially sweet, can attract ants. You can not leave sugar, baked goods, honey, jam in accessible places - these are the most favorite delicacies of small insects. You should always wipe the table from the crumbs and wash the dishes immediately after eating.
- The neighbors engaged in harassing ants in their apartment. The surviving part of the colony went to the nearest house to seek refuge. Probably, this is where your apartment became.
Based on the reasons for the appearance of ants in the house, the prevention will consist of the following:
- Regular and thorough cleaning in the kitchen, eliminating the possibility that the remains of food will be on the table, floor and other surfaces.
- Avoiding food in other rooms where crumbs, spilled sweet tea, etc. can remain.
- Careful sealing of even the smallest crevices in skirting boards, window frames, doorways, walls, floors.
- Tracking the appearance of signs of the presence of insects in the apartment and the timely fight against them.
Danger of ants for people:
- They irritate purely from an aesthetic point of view. Ubiquitous and nosy, they are able to climb even into sealed bags. They can be found in towels, personal care products. All this becomes the reason that you are ashamed to invite visitors to the house and it's unpleasant to be in it yourself.
- Ants with a view to self-defense often bite people. For some it's just an unpleasant factor, but for allergy sufferers the ant bite can become a much bigger problem.
- These insects are the bearer of microbes. They can visit first in your trash can, and then stroll around the table or climb into a cup, a plate and so on. This apart from the fact that they could carry the infection from the street.
- Ants can cause significant damage to food and your budget. Agree, if you find them in a package with sweets or cookies, it's unlikely that you want to consume them and just throw them all away.
Red ants in the apartment
Some of the most frequent uninvited "guests" are small red ants . In the apartment appear either immediately large colony, or at first run the scout. Red house ants differ from garden ants. They are incapable of hibernating for the winter, because they inhabit warm houses, where they begin to parasitize and harm. Inhabited in the secluded corners of your apartment, they avoid the need to build an anthill. Eating the remains of food from your table, they get rid of the need to earn their living by hard work. The main reasons for their appearance are the search for warmth and abundance of food.
Brown ants in the apartment
The usual brown turf little ants in the apartment, most likely, you accidentally appeared. Perhaps you or someone from other inmates of the house brought them on clothes or shoes. For this species of ants it is not typical to seek shelter and livelihood in human houses. You will not see in their apartment their squad. A single insect can simply be released back to freedom.
Yellow ants in the apartment
Light-yellow house ants in the apartment are much smaller than the red Pharaohs. Like other people from warm countries, these insects prefer to live in warm homes, rather than in nature. They penetrate to us on shoes and clothes, crawl through the cracks in the floor and walls, through the ventilation shafts. Finding their nest is not so easy, because they choose to live the nooks of our home - crevices under the baseboards, ventilation boxes, floors between the floors. But their regular raids in search of food can bring a lot of inconvenience.
Black ants in the apartment
For large black ants it is uncharacteristic to appear for a long time in a house or apartment. They prefer to settle in the garden, graze the aphids there, build anthills. If it so happens that they crawled to you, fighting ants in the apartment will not become something very difficult. You just have to block them from getting into the housing, and those who have already penetrated etch one of the below mentioned means. If an anthill of black ants is located close to home, you can take it away on a shovel.
White ants in the apartment
As such, there are no white ants in nature. White or transparent are very young individuals, which have not yet acquired the main color. If you notice such insects, it means that somewhere near the ant nest is located. The main thing that ants in an apartment are afraid of is the destruction of the place of their reproduction and habitat, that is, this very nest. Finding white ants, you can quickly find it.
Effective remedy for ants in the apartment
It's one thing if the garden ants wandered into your apartment accidentally through the cracks. You simply expel these single "guests", seal the path of penetration and for the reliability of processing them from the outside with something that smells stink. Another question is how to deal with domestic ants in the apartment, who come in colonies and feel themselves masters. With such persistent parasitic cohabitants, the struggle will be more prolonged and serious. There are a lot of means, industrial and self-made, ready to help you.
Boric acid from ants in the apartment
Ants in an apartment are afraid of boric acid, while for a person it is almost completely safe. This poison is a white odorless powder that dissolves in water. You can buy boric acid in any pharmacy, its cost is low. The effect of this remedy is in the neurological and sterilizing effect.
So, boric acid from ants in the apartment is a recipe:
- Dry bait. The acid powder is mixed with sugar and sprinkled with tracks, along which the ants and places of their accumulations walk. It will not be superfluous to sprinkle such a mixture of the area under the sink and near the trash can.
- Liquid bait. It is necessary to mix 5 g of boric acid with 50 g of sugar and add 50 g of water. To attract insects, you can add a little jam or honey to the mixture. This bait should be placed in small caps from cans and bottles and spread out around the apartment.
Traps for ants in the apartment
You can use both ready-made trays sold in specialized departments, as well as self-made ones, for example, the boric acid traps described above. Both are aimed at destroying the ants that infiltrated them. They attract, for the most part, a smell. Having smeared in the poison, the insect brings it to the nest, where it infects other individuals, including the uterus.
By the way, the main struggle should be directed precisely at the destruction of the uterus, without which the colony will quickly decay and die out. With the use of traps, you do not have to puzzle over how to find the ant's uterus in an apartment. Moreover, their nests can be in the most unexpected places. Poisoned insects themselves will carry the poison into the nest and thereby inflict damage to their colony and its head.
Dichlorvos from ants in the apartment
This tool is known to many people since time immemorial. Thinking about how to get rid of small ants in the apartment, spray dichlorvos comes to mind one of the first. The modern drug is not so toxic for people and does not have such an intense unpleasant smell as it used to be. That the ants in the apartment quickly disappeared, you need to spray dichlorvos in the places of their probable habitat and nutrition: in the cracks, pipes and under the plinth, on the back of the carpets, the area near the sink and trash can. In this case, the jet does not need to be closer than 30 cm from the surface to be treated.
Vinegar from the ants in the apartment
A popular and at the same time very effective way how to get home ants from an apartment is to use ordinary table vinegar. His ants smell absolutely can not stand. In addition, the vinegar-treated paths no longer smell of ant enzymes, so that insects can not find their way to the nest. The ants in your apartment are fighting with vinegar:
- We prepare the solution. To do this, mix in an equal proportion of vinegar and water.
- We find trails of insects and, if possible, their nest. They will be places where ants often move in search of food and where they always gather in groups.
- We process the trails and the nest from the atomizer, pouring into it the previously prepared mixture. The fragrance of vinegar disorients ants, forcing you to move away from your home in search of more favorable living conditions.
Ammonia alcohol from the ants in the apartment
Like vinegar, ammonia spoils ants with its odor. To treat the ant tracks and places of the accumulation of insects it is necessary to dilute it with water in the proportion 1:10. That is, in a liter of water pour a bottle of ammonia (100 g). How to get rid of small ants in the apartment: the resulting solution needs to process the floor, cabinets, tables, cabinets and other surfaces. Interestingly, people will soon cease to sense the smell of ammonia, and the ants will feel it for a long time. Periodically, the treatment must be repeated until the ants completely leave your apartment.
Yeast from ants in the apartment
Perhaps the simplest and most affordable remedy for house ants in the apartment is ordinary yeast, which we use for baking. They need to be mixed with a little water, for flavor add honey or jam and bait in the most visited places of ants. Insects, having tasted such a "delicacy" will simply burst and die from an overabundance of yeast in the stomach.
Ultrasound from ants in the apartment
Relative novelty in the market of funds from domestic pests, ultrasonic repeller, managed to get a wide publicity among those who seek to minimize the use of all sorts of poisons in their home. In practice, it has been proven that such devices can cope well with the ejection of cockroaches and rodents. If you are concerned about small ants in the apartment, how to get rid of them? Unfortunately, most ultrasonic repellents leave the ants indifferent to the effects of sound waves. So their effectiveness against these insects is doubtful.