How to Get Rid of Sugar Ants

There are different types of pests – dangerous, scary, harmless, or outright annoying. Sugar ants are the annoying kind – they aren’t poisonous or dangerous but can leave you feeling frustrated. The sight of having them invade your kitchen cabinets and crawl over everything sweet is stressing, to say the least.

What are sugar ants?

Sugar ants are tiny insects with characteristic brownish bodies, blackheads, and mandibles. They can come in wide-ranging shapes, sizes, and colors depending on their role. Worker ants, for instance, have orange-brownish color while the soldier ants are blackish. Queen ants are usually the largest, growing between 5 and 15 millimeters in size.

Understanding their habits

Before you set out to get rid of sugar ants, it’s essential to learn as much as you can about their behavior. These insects love moist, damp, and dark habitats. You’ll usually spot them deep in the forest, in urban centers, among the heaths, in the woodlands, and homes. Sugar ants nest in plants’ roots, old wood, bushes and shrubs, tree shrugs, under rocks and buried in the soil. You can easily identify their nest by checking for little mounds with a little entrance on the top, more like a small volcano. Inside the hill, you’ll find several paths designed for the efficient flow of activities, and at the core, is the queen that produces more ants.

Now that you know a little bit about these little creatures let’s look at how you can eliminate them from your home.

Identify the entry points

Your first battle line is to find out how these ants are getting into your home. There must be a hole, a crack, crevice or opening that’s serving as the point of entry. Once you spot the entry point, place bait just next to it to poison the ants. Bait may include things like Borax, cornstarch or diatomaceous earth and so on. Later on, you may want to seal off these spaces to avoid future invasion.

Identify what’s attracting them to your home

Sugar ants don’t just appear in your home out of the blues – there must be something that draws them in. It could be that your house has some damp and dark places which they find conducive or the food droppings on the kitchen counter or floor. It could also be an open sugar dish or cereal jar. If you are unsure what’s attracting the pests to your house, you may try following their trails – this will either lead you to the source, or their nest. Once you identify the food resource, clear it, and ensure that the rest of the foods are tightly enclosed in a pest-proof container.

Treat your home

As mentioned earlier, you can use powders and other baits to eliminate these pests. However, while you are at it, ensure that your kids and pets aren’t exposed to these treatments. Some products, like Borax can cause reactions.

Hire an expert

If all else fails, or if you do not feel like going through this gruesome process, you may want to call an expert exterminator. These professionals have the right resources to help get you out of your pest misery.

Post Author: Cedric Walker