Where do ants come from in the house and should they be feared

In order to understand where domestic ants come from, one should first of all be well aware of their lifestyle and requirements for the conditions of existence. Ants in the house can be either by chance or be its permanent inhabitants.

Generally speaking, in the conditions of Russia, species of domestic ants are quite few. These include:

1. Pharaoh Ants - These small ants are one of the most common household pests. They are not able to live in the wild in the temperate zone, and therefore in our country they are found only in human dwellings.
2. House ants-thieves, adapted more to life in nature than than indoors.

In both of these species, the workers are usually yellow, often tinged with orange-red. But red ants at home are almost always random guests who cannot harm the products. Nevertheless, if such completely non-domestic ants appeared in the room, you need to find out where they come from and block their penetration paths so that even individual insects do not crawl into the house.

On a note

Domestic red ants are not found in Russia.All ants that are able to settle and breed in a human dwelling are yellow or reddish in color. It is exceptionally rare that red carpenter ants settle at the junctions of logs in wooden houses located in forests, but because of such isolated cases, they cannot be called domestic ants.

 

House ants and random guests

A domestic ant is quite clearly different from a wild ant that accidentally entered the room.

The photo below shows domestic ants, they are also pharaohs:

The size of each such working ant is only 2-3 mm. It has a reddish or yellowish body. In most cases, domestic ants belong to this species. And if small ants appeared at home, and the apartment is located above the third floor, these are almost certainly pharaoh ants.

The following photo shows what domestic thieving ants look like:

Yellow house thief ants are usually not as numerous as pharaoh ants. Usually they appear in private houses and cottages, most often in basements and basement floors - in nature they settle in the ground next to anthills of other ant species. In apartment buildings, these small insects can settle in rooms on the first two or three floors.

As a result, the owners are often surprised where these small ants come from at home - it turns out that their young females come from the street, find secluded places in or near the room and establish a colony from which working individuals regularly run out into the apartment.

In the photo - house ants-thieves:

It is interesting

The thief ant got its name not at all because of its tendency to steal food.The fact is that in nature these ants parasitize in anthills of larger species, stealing food and brood from the hosts, but escaping in their own minks, which are too small for large ants to penetrate into them. These small house ants are very flexible in their choice of food, and can easily live without access to other anthills, which, in fact, happens in a human dwelling.

Red wood ants appear indoors either in random searches for food - if we are talking about a private house - or they are brought in by the owners themselves with food and things. "Domestic" red ants cannot live permanently in the house, because they do not find enough food here. Other ants can accidentally get into the apartment - black garden ants, carpenter ants, sometimes even reapers.

All of them are much larger than pharaoh ants and never make their nests here.

 

Where do these pests come from?

Pharaoh ants constantly live in heated rooms - in principle, they are not able to survive the cold season on the street. These house ants appear indoors for several reasons:

1. Infection of neighboring apartments, basements or attics - from growing colonies, insects simply disperse to new premises in search of food and places to organize new nests. In an apartment building, one colony can have nests on several floors in dozens of apartments, vestibules and technical rooms. Often they enter the apartment from ventilation ducts and garbage chutes.
2. It is also possible to bring the uterus or the whole nest into a room with furniture, household appliances, food. Actually, this is how these house ants spread throughout the world.

On a note

Sometimes it is useful to carefully check whether the ants are actually in the house, or if this is a false alarm. It happens, for example, that several dozen forest ants come to the apartment in a bag of potatoes, which spread throughout the premises, but die within a few days or a week. It is possible to say that ants have wound up in the house only when they meet regularly for several weeks.

Ants-thieves enter the house only from the street or from the basement. They do not have the ability to occupy vast spaces with their colonies and rarely create daughter families indoors.

As noted above, sometimes wood-boring ants can establish their colony within the walls of a wooden house - this is typical for dilapidated buildings.

 

Why are ants dangerous in the house?

Domestic pharaoh ants do not bite. Their jaws are too small and weak to damage human skin. Therefore, the bites of domestic ants are rather fiction, and photographs of flea or bedbug bites are usually issued for their photos.

Review

“For the last week, some insects have bitten me at night. Tell me what the bites of domestic ants look like and whether they bite a person at all. It seems that there are no fleas or mosquitoes in the house, only ants. Red spots constantly appear on the legs, which are very itchy.

Maria, Semipalatinsk

Only wild ants, accidentally brought into the room from the street, really bite. Typical carpenter ants, red wood ants, reaper ants are all large enough and can bite sensitively when threatened. In general, this happens very rarely, since these types of ants rarely find themselves in houses.And they certainly won't bite you at night.

The danger of domestic ants (pharaoh) is not in their bites, but in other factors associated with their vital activity:

1. These ants carry pathogens on their paws from garbage chutes, toilets and technical rooms to the apartment.
2. They spoil food indoors.
3. They create their own food storages in different places in a residential building, where food eventually deteriorates and causes the appearance and reproduction of molds and microorganisms.
4. In addition, pharaoh ants in different places of the apartment create their own places for storing garbage and excrement, where they take out everything unnecessary from the nests.

Thus, small yellow ants at home may well be carriers of various microbes on food, although little is known about their epidemiological significance. In any case, if ants appear in the house, they will only worsen the sanitary situation in the room.

It is interesting

According to folk beliefs, ants in the house are a very good omen. These insects are known for their industriousness and tendency to constantly multiply and increase the amount of food supplies. Therefore, it is believed that if ants appeared in the house, there will always be prosperity and harmony.

 

A bit of biology: how and where do domestic ants live

Like all their relatives, house ants live in colonies. One colony can unite a large number of nests located in different rooms, apartments and utility rooms.

In pharaoh ants, several female queens and hundreds, and sometimes thousands of worker ants, can live in each nest.All nests of one colony are interconnected: worker ants can transfer brood and food from one nest to another, and the entire colony works as a single living organism.

In thieving ants, only one queen can live in one nest, with the death of which the colony dies out or, in rare cases, one of the breeding daughters of the dead queen settles in it. Thief ants do not build networks of nests, and one colony usually huddles in one shelter.

It is interesting

The nest of domestic ants can be located anywhere - behind platbands and baseboards, under and inside furniture, right in food products, in household appliances, in sockets, wall crevices and between ceilings on balconies, sometimes even in clothes hanging idle. Such a kind of anthill takes up little space and can even fit in a jacket pocket.

The nest is founded by a young fertilized queen. It is easy to distinguish it from worker ants - it is about one and a half times larger than them, in thieving ants - it has a dark brown color with two yellow constrictions on the abdomen. You can find the uterus of domestic ants only in the nest - it never leaves it.

In the photo - the uterus of ants-thieves:

And here are several queens of pharaoh ants in one nest:

The young queen usually finds a secluded place suitable for the formation of a new colony, and lays her first few eggs here. She also feeds the larvae with the secretion of the salivary glands. The first worker ants begin to actively search for food and feed the new larvae and the queen itself, take on the responsibility of caring for the nest, and the queen becomes just a generator of new eggs.

When the colony becomes large enough, young females and males begin to appear in it. In pharaoh ants, they mate right there in the nest, and young queens can stay here, laying eggs with old females, or they can crawl and look for places to create new colonies. In thieving ants, all females leave the nest, and only in rare cases does a very large colony divide into two parts, one of which leaves with the young queen.

Females crawling out of the nest in search of a new shelter are the same ants with wings that can also sometimes be found in the house. In the middle of summer, such young females from the street can enter the house. If they are not taken back, they will find secluded places and reward the hospitable owners of the apartment with a fully formed colony in a few months.

House ants breed very quickly. In a few months, up to a hundred insects already appear in a new nest, and in a year the colony often grows to a number of several thousand ants.

The main food of ants in the house is the usual food for humans. These insects are omnivorous, and any groceries, bread, vegetables and fruits, and confectionery are suitable for them as food. Domestic ants are especially fond of sugar and any dry products of animal origin - food for animals and aquarium fish, animal feed, dried meat and fish.

Worker house ants live from several weeks to several months, and females - up to a year. Their life expectancy is highly dependent on temperature (at low temperatures it is higher) and diet. The optimal living conditions for domestic ants are a room temperature of about 30 ° C and a relative humidity of 50% to 80%.

 

What to do if there are ants in the house

If there are ants in your house, they need to be removed quickly and as carefully as possible. Moreover, you need to start doing this as early as possible in order to deal with one small nest instead of a huge colony throughout the apartment, which can form if measures are not taken in time.

Special insecticidal preparations are very effective against domestic ants:

• Aerosol products in cylinders - Raptor, Raid, Kombat, Dichlorvos of any brand. They are easy to use, relatively inexpensive and work great when processing found nests. And if the nest is not available, then you need to process the surfaces around it.
• Concentrates for dilution and subsequent spraying in the form of a spray (Delta Zona, Executioner, Tetrix, Get, Kukaracha, Karbofos, Sinuzan and others). They are usually more effective than aerosols, but are more difficult to use. Some drugs can be dangerous to humans and have a strong unpleasant odor, so it is better to choose safe products that are adapted for domestic use and odorless (for example, Lambda Zone, Delta Zone, Get). The treatment of attics, garbage chutes and basements with such preparations is also very effective.
• Insecticidal powders (dusts) - for example, Feverfew powder, Phenaksin, Clean House. They crumble in places where insects are most frequent, but work much more slowly than liquid insecticides. Pencils also work well against ants (crayons, for example, Masha), but insects can develop resistance to some of them.
• Gels are perhaps the best means for removing ants.They are applied in lines in places where insects often appear and near their nests, and ants drag drops of poisoned gel into the nest, poison themselves and poison queens and larvae. The most famous gels are Globol (German remedy), Shturm, Fas, Dohloks, etc.
• And finally, folk remedies. Borax and boric acid, yeast soaked in water or added to jam are very effective against ants. Kerosene and turpentine also work well when pouring them into all the nests found in the house (however, you need to remember that these liquids are very flammable and smelly).

Ants are afraid of certain smells and substances. For example, they leave rooms that constantly smell of garlic. They also avoid places where sunflower oil is spilled. But using these means to remove them is generally ineffective.

When treating premises from ants, it should be remembered that the more surfaces that are treated with an insecticidal preparation, the less likely the ants will survive. If an apartment building is infected with ants, the fight against them in one apartment will be temporary - insects will constantly return from neighbors.

In such cases, you need to either fight pests with the whole house with the simultaneous processing of stairwells, attic and basement, or call pest control services. The latter are also effective for cleaning one apartment: if ants appeared at home, after calling exterminators, the owners do not need to do almost anything - all work will be done by professionals. But usually such pleasure is more expensive than the option of independent struggle.

Ultrasonic and electromagnetic repellers are useless against ants.Of course, prayer or a conspiracy from domestic ants will not work either, which, as practice shows (and this is surprising), is still sometimes practiced by villagers.

 

Prevention measures

To prevent ants from appearing in the house (including again, after a successful extermination procedure), it is necessary to block the ways of their penetration here and organize preventive protection of the premises. For this:

1. All joints of pipes and their entrances to walls, ceilings and floors in the kitchen and bathroom are sealed.
2. The walls on the balconies are carefully puttied.
3. The apartment is kept clean, food remains are regularly removed from the table, wet cleaning is carried out in all rooms without exception.
4. Near windows, doors and ventilation ducts, sections from insects with the smell of citrus are hung.

It is also useful to communicate with neighbors periodically. If any of them are fighting or complaining about ants, you should always be on the lookout and be ready to act quickly the first time the insects enter the house. So the problem of infection of the apartment can be solved already in the early stages.

 

An example of a very unusual place that ants have chosen to create their anthill in the house

 

An interesting video: why domestic ants are difficult to breed and how to deal with them anyway