Fight Ants

Ants can cause a major nuisance in homes, restaurants, retail or other food businesses. Ants can contaminate food by coming in contact with it, which can cause you as a business owner to suffer losses. After all, the food will have to be thrown away. Ants can also carry pathogens, making them highly undesirable in hospitals, for example, especially the Pharaoh ant.

In or around your home, ants can be incredibly annoying because they cause a lot of nuisance. They look for a food source and make running paths from the nest to this source. And let the food source be in your kitchen or pantry. A beginning ant infestation is then inevitable.

Ants are related to wasps, even though most ant species cannot fly. In July or August we see the so called flying ants, these are the young queens and males that fly out to be fertilized. This is called the nuptial flight, after this nuptial flight the new queen will start a new nest. The population consists of workers who live an average of 2 to 3 years and a queen who can live as long as 15 to 20 years! The nest will not disappear all that time unless you have a professional control method applied to it.

The workers have incredibly good senses to detect food sources from great distances. Most ants really like sweet foods, such as fruits and lemonade, but will also eat meat, insects and fungi if nothing else is available.

The shiny wood ant

The shiny wood ant, as its name predicts, prefers wooden dwelling places for their nests. but they also occur in crawl spaces and the cavity wall, via these routes they can get inside. They are shiny black and are 4 to 6 mm . The males and queens are both winged. Thus the shiny wood ants also have multiple queens on 1 nest, because there are multiple queens the nests can grow extremely fast.

Mediterranean draaigatje

This ant species has been present in the Netherlands for 10 years. Because the climate changed, this ant species can survive in the Netherlands. The problem of the draaigatje ant is that these have multiple queens, these queens do not start their own nest but join the existing nest so a nest can become very large in no time. To control a nest, the queens must be controlled. Because at a more advanced stage several queens have joined the nest, controlling them becomes a major challenge. It is therefore important to control the ants at an early stage. They are quite small 2 and 5 mm and are shiny black.

If you encounter multiple live ants, chances are you have an ant problem. If the ant nest in the neighborhood is large enough, this can lead to an infestation, and Protect Pest Control recommends that you contact them in this case for effective control of this problem before the nuisance becomes too great. Indeed, walkways created by ants are marked with a certain smell so that other ants can also find this path to the food source, piles of sand and subsidence are an important indication of the presence of a nest.

The main reason ants come into the house is because they can apparently find plenty of food there. Therefore, the easiest solution to prevent ants is to remove the food source. Of course, this is more difficult when you are preparing food during the nice summer months and eating it nicely in the garden or on your balcony, sometimes leaving some food on the kitchen counter or food leftovers. Pet food can also become a food source if it is not immediately eaten by your pet. In addition, of course, we often have food supplies in our kitchen cabinets that are simply necessary. In that case, try to make sure these are properly, airtight sealed and insects cannot get to them

Therefore, proper cleaning remains very important, as sweet food particles can be easily found by these clever critters. Furthermore, holes and cracks in walls or floors create passageways that make it easier for ants to enter your home or business premises. Ants even find their way to the garbage container and trash can, because they can smell that there is food here. Protect Pest Control therefore advises you to empty the garbage can as often as possible and not to leave food in here for long.

Do it yourself or outsource?

There are DIY products available for ants that can provide a temporary solution. However, it is wise to contact a professional pest control company such as Protect Pest Control for long-term and effective control.

Protect Pest Control is skilled and has mastered all techniques optimally, which also allows them to take into account the lifestyle of each species of ant, as well as your personal situation, during control. We always provide a fast, professional and sustainable solution to your pest problem.