Little red ants in the apartment

It's great when there are animals at home! A dog, a cat or a hamster, even a rat or Madagascar cockroach - the main thing is that your love should be mutual. But what to do if one day you find uninvited guests who are gradually occupying your territory - if ants are wandering around you?

Very often insects invade houses. Where do the red ants in the apartment come from, how to get rid of these unpleasant creatures and prevent them from reappearing? Immediately, we note that many city dwellers face this problem. Living even in the very center of the megalopolis is not a guarantee that it will not arise. To understand how to get rid of "lodgers", it is important to know where they come from and what attracts them.

Where do the red ants come from?

Like most insects, ants are attracted to two things - heat and food. They appear where the temperature is not lower than 15 degrees. A couple of copies can get into the apartment with you, having previously attached to the clothes (especially if you worked in the country or walked in the park). If there are cats and dogs at home, then ants can “come” on their wool. As a rule, such random penetrations are safe - it is enough to throw the guests out the window.

It’s another thing if whole columns of red ants were seen in the apartment. How to get rid of a large accumulation of insects? Need to talk with neighbors. Most often, ants penetrate from the apartments nearby, so the whole house will have to fight them. A few more options are visits from the basement (if the apartment is located on the ground floor) and the garbage chutes.

Getting rid of large concentrations of insects is not easy, but quite realistic.

Nest search

The first stage of the struggle is the search for the place of the main cluster of red ants in the apartment. How to find a nest? The photo shows that it is very difficult not to see the mass aggregation of these insects. It is important to know which places are most attractive for the uterus:

• the bathroom is warm and humid here, it is very easy to hide. The nest can be under the bathroom, tile, washing machine. The uterus multiplies in hard-to-see, places that are invisible at first glance, so we arm ourselves with a flashlight and look for places we have never been to before;
• kitchen. There are a lot of food and places where you can hide and quietly multiply. In the channels for electrical wiring, under the drawers, refrigerator and kitchen sink should be seen first;
• the overlap between the floors is a less desirable, but also a fairly common variant of the location of the nest. We'll have to try hard to find and eliminate the ant shelter here.

How to get rid of red ants?

Red ants in dwellings - a common phenomenon. It is not surprising that there are many methods of pest control, using store tools and homemade recipes.

Purchased insect repellents

• Aerosols. This remedy is effective if small red ants are found in the apartment. How to get rid of the colony? Using an aerosol, this can only be done if the location of the nest is known. Spray the agent directly onto the insect mass collection.
• Gels. Act as bait. The ant eats the poisonous gel, carries it into the nest, infects its comrades. A day later, toxins begin to act, and the family dies.
• Dusts and special pencils. These are inexpensive and non-toxic to humans means, but getting rid of insects with their help requires a long and hard struggle. They put the line in the most popular places among the ants (plinth, kitchen furniture, under the bathroom). This should be done daily. One of the effective inexpensive pencils is “Clean House”, which can be bought in hardware stores.
• Traps. They represent a container with a bait that acts like a gel: an ant eats up the contents and infects its congeners. The main thing is that during the day he visited his nest and infected the uterus - only in this case, you can completely get rid of pests. The advantage of traps is their safety for humans, which allows them to be used in the kitchen. By the way, electrical traps, working from the outlet, are not effective in the fight against red ants.

Folk recipes

It is considered that the best remedy for red ants in an apartment is purchased, and the more expensive, the more effective. In fact, this is far from the case. Many homemade insect control recipes allow you to permanently get rid of the problem. Here are the most effective ones.

• Lure your own hands with boric acid. Cooked hard-boiled egg yolk mixed with sugar, add 20 g of pharmacy liquid. Make small lumps from the resulting mixture and place them in places where insects were spotted. Boric acid acts as a poison - in a day you can notice a large number of dead ants. As a rule, insects are infected from each other, due to which you can eliminate most of the colonies.
• Yeast in combination with sugar. By causing fermentation, this delicacy spoils the food for the larvae, leaving them without food. With this recipe you can stop the breeding of insects.
• Scotch traps. Such a simple remedy makes it possible to get rid of only a small number of ants.

Invasion prevention

Getting rid of insects once, it is important to prevent their reappearance. For this:

• you should not leave food open, especially in the warm season;
• cleanliness in the kitchen and bathroom should be kept; garbage should be disposed of in a timely manner;
• talk to your neighbors - if they have a similar problem, then it should be solved together;
• need to find and destroy the nest. Only in this case it is safe to say that ants will not appear.

To combat ants, it is desirable to use several methods at once. If the "living creatures" very much, if the classical methods of elimination do not help, do not despair. There are professional insect control services, whose specialists will quickly fix the problem with the most modern tools and equipment. The only negative is the cost of such a service.