May 15th, 2020 by Sarah Miles

If you are not a fan of flying insects (and let’s face it, who is?) then so-called ‘flying ant day’ is a pretty unpleasant prospect. Have you ever noticed, usually around late spring or early summer, swarms of flying ants everywhere? Often it just lasts for a day but can last longer. This, appropriately, is known as flying ant day and the reason that millions of ants take flight is that they’re out to find a mate. Once they mate, the winged male ants die and the queen snaps off her wings and seeks out a suitable location to start a new colony. Flying ant day is quite unpleasant in itself but the real issue here is what follows: thousands of new ant colonies, all looking for new sources of food.

Flying ant day itself is, therefore, not the thing you need to prepare for as such; it’s the colonies of ants that follow. It does, however, give you due notice that you need to be on the lookout around July and August because if they find your home as a source of food, you’re going to need some strategies to deal with them.

Can you prevent ants coming into your home?

While prevention is always better than a cure, it’s very difficult to stop ants finding their way into your home. They’re tiny, with strong jaws and are resourceful so are well skilled in overcoming most obstacles. It would be impossible to seal up every crack and crevice, however, you can make your home less attractive to ants by making it difficult to find food: clearing all traces of food away, including crumbs, and keeping packets sealed up tight. Perhaps easier said than done?

Understanding ants

If you want strategies for getting rid of ants, it’s useful to understand how ant colonies operate. A colony is made up of one queen and around 30,000 male worker ants. The queen ant, once she has mated during her nuptial flight, can lay eggs for the rest of their life so unless you kill the queen, you won’t destroy the colony. The queen will remain within the nest while the worker ants go out to find food for her.

If they do find their way in and find food, scout ants will then return to the nest leaving a pheromone trail. This acts as an ‘ant sat nav’ to enable large numbers of ants from the colony to find their way to the source of food which they will take back to the nest.

How to get rid of ants

To effectively get rid of ants you need to do 3 things: kill the ants, kill the queen, and remove the trail. A multi-faceted approach is therefore vital.

To kill the queen, and therefore prevent any new eggs being laid, you can use an ant bait station. They are small units that attract ants in with a sweet fragrance that ants love. The poisoned bait within the station is then taken back and fed to the queen.

To kill the ants, dusting powder and trigger sprays can be used along the pheromone trail and around cupboards, skirting boards and door frames. This kills any ants it comes into contact with and disrupts the trail, which you can then clean up.

For severe infestations, smoke bombs can allow you to get into every nook and cranny in one fell swoop.