Where do ants come from in the house and do you need to be afraid of them

In order to understand where the home ants come from, it is first necessary to be well aware of their way of life and the requirements for the conditions of existence. Ants in a house can be either accidentally or be its permanent inhabitants.

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

1. Pharaoh ants - these small ants are among the most common home pests. They are not able to live in the wild in the temperate zone, and therefore in our country are found only in human habitation.
2. House ants thieves, adapted more to life in nature, rather than indoors.

In both of these species, working individuals usually have a yellow color, often with a hint of orange-red. But red ants at home - almost always random guests who can not harm the products. However, if such non-domestic ants appeared in the room, you need to find out where they come from and block their entry paths so that even some 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 person’s dwelling are yellow or reddish in color. It is extremely rare in the wooden houses located in the woods at the junction of logs red dwarf ants settle, but because of such isolated cases it is impossible to call them home ants.

 

Home ants and occasional guests

House ant quite clearly differs from the wild, accidentally penetrated into the room.

The photo below shows the domestic ants, they are also Pharaoh:

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 home ants thieves look like:

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

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

On the photo are house thieves:

It is interesting

The ant-thief got its name not because of the tendency to steal food. The fact is that in nature, these ants parasitize in the anthills of larger species, stealing food and brood from the owners, but escaping in their own burrows, which are too small to large ants could penetrate them. These small domestic ants are very plastic in the choice of food, and can easily live without access to other anthills, which, in fact, happens in a person’s dwelling.

Indoor red forest ants appear either in a random search for food - if we are talking about a private house - or they are brought in by the owners themselves with food and things. Constantly in the house “domestic” red ants cannot live, because they do not find here enough food. Other ants can accidentally get into the apartment - black gardeners, tree ants, and 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 premises - in principle, they are not able to survive the cold season outside. These domestic ants appear indoors for several reasons:

1. The contamination 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 premises. Often they enter the apartment from the ventilation ducts and chutes.
2. It is also possible skidding of the uterus or the whole nest in the room with furniture, 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 bred in the house, or it is a false alarm. It happens, for example, in a sack of potatoes, several dozen forest ants come to the apartment, who crawl all over the premises, but die within a few days or a week. To say that ants bred in the house, it is possible only when they meet regularly for several weeks.

Thief ants enter the house only from the street or from the basements. They do not have the ability to occupy vast spaces with their colonies and rarely create daughter families on the premises.

As noted above, sometimes carpenter ants can found their own colony in the walls of a wooden house - this is typical of dilapidated buildings.

 

What are dangerous ants 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 for photos they are usually given photos of flea bites or bedbugs.

Feedback

“I have been bitten by insects last night at night. Tell me what the bites of house ants look like and whether they bite a person at all. Like no fleas, no mosquitoes in the house there, only ants. There are constantly red spots on the legs, which are very itchy. ”

Maria, Semipalatinsk

Truly bite only wild ants, accidentally brought into the room from the street. Typical woodwire ants, red forest ants, ants reapers - all of them are quite large, and can be sensitive to bite at danger. In general, this happens very rarely, since these species of ants rarely end up in homes. And they certainly won't bite you at night.

The danger of domestic ants (Pharaoh) is not in their bites, but in other factors related to their vital activity:

1. These ants carry pathogens on the legs of the garbage disposal, toilets and technical premises in the apartment.
2. They spoil the food in the room.
3. Create their own storage of food stocks in different places of a residential house, where products eventually spoil and cause the appearance and reproduction of mold fungi and microorganisms.
4. In addition, the pharaoh ants in different places of the apartment create their own places of storage of garbage and excrement, where they take out all unnecessary from the nests.

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

It is interesting

In accordance with popular belief, ants in the house are a very good sign. These insects are known for their diligence and propensity to constantly multiply and increase the amount of food supplies. Therefore, it is believed that if there are ants in the house, there will always be prosperity and harmony.

 

Some biology: how and where do home ants live

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

In Pharaoh ants, several queen females and hundreds, and sometimes thousands of working ants, can live in each nest.All the nests of one colony are interconnected: working ants can transfer brood and food from one nest to another, and the whole colony works as a single living organism.

In ant thieves, 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 uterus settles in it. Ants thieves do not build a network of nests, and one colony usually huddles in a single shelter.

It is interesting

The nest of household ants can be located anywhere - behind the platbands and baseboards, under the furniture and inside it, right in food, in household appliances, in sockets, in the cracks of the walls and between the ceilings on the balconies, sometimes even in hanging clothes. This kind of anthill takes up little space and can even fit in a jacket pocket.

The young fertilized uterus founds the nest. It is easy to distinguish it from working ants — it is about one and a half times larger than them, and it is dark brown with two yellow constricts on the abdomen of anted thieves. To find the uterus of domestic ants is possible only in the nest - it never leaves it.

In the photo - the womb of ants thieves:

And here - a few queens of the pharaoh ants in one nest:

The young uterus usually finds a secluded place convenient for the formation of a new colony, and lays here several first eggs. She feeds the larvae with the secret of the salivary glands. The first working ants begin to actively look for food and feed new larvae and the uterus themselves, take over the responsibility of caring for the nest, and the uterus becomes just a generator of new eggs.

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

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

Home ants breed very quickly. Within a few months, up to hundreds of insects appear in a new nest, and over the year a colony often grows to a number of several thousand ants.

Home food of ants in the house - the usual human food. These insects are omnivores, and any groceries, bread, vegetables and fruits, confectionery are suitable as food. Domestic ants are especially fond of sugar and any dry animal products - animal feed and aquarium fish, animal feed, dried meat and fish.

Working domestic ants live from several weeks to several months, and females - up to a year. Their lifespan strongly depends on temperature (it is higher at low temperatures) and diet. The optimal living conditions of domestic ants is a room temperature of about 30 ° C and relative air humidity from 50% to 80%.

 

What if ants start up in the house

If ants are bred in your home, you need to remove them quickly and as thoroughly as possible.Moreover, it is necessary to begin to do this as early as possible in order to fight with one small nest instead of a huge colony throughout the apartment, which can form if you do not take action in time.

Special insecticidal preparations are very effective against domestic ants:

• Aerosol spray cans - Raptor, Raid, Combat, Dichlorvos of any brand. They are easy to use, relatively inexpensive and work well when processing nests found. And if the nest is not available, then you need to process the surface around it.
• Concentrates for dilution and subsequent spraying in the form of a spray (Delta Zone, Hangman, Tetrix, Geth, Kukaracha, Karbofos, Sinuzan and others). They are usually more effective than aerosols, but 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 have no smell (for example, Lambda Zone, Delta Zone, Geth). The treatment of such attics, garbage chutes and basements is also very effective.
• Insecticidal powders (dusts) - for example, Pyrethrum powder, Fenaxin, Pure house.They crumble in places of the most frequent occurrence of insects, but work much slower than liquid insecticides. Pencils (crayons, for example, Masha) also work well for ants, but some of them can develop resistance in insects.
• Gels are probably the best means for breeding ants. They are put in lines in places of frequent insects and near their nests, and ants drag drops of the poisoned gel into the nest, poison themselves and poison the queens and larvae. The best known are Globol gels (German remedy), Sturm, Fas, Dohloks, etc.
• And, finally, folk remedies. Very effective against borax ants and boric acid, yeast, soaked in water or added to jam. Kerosene and turpentine also work well when they pour out all the nests found in the house (however, it must be remembered that these fluids are very fire-hazardous and smell much).

Ants are afraid of some odors and substances. For example, they leave rooms in which they constantly smell of garlic. They also avoid places where sunflower oil is spilled. But to use these means for their removal is a task that is generally ineffective.

When processing premises from ants, it should be remembered that the more surfaces will be treated with an insecticidal preparation, the less ants will have a chance to survive. If an apartment house is infected with ants, the fight with them in one apartment will be temporary - insects will constantly return from their neighbors.

In such cases, it is necessary either to control the pests of the entire house while simultaneously processing the staircases, the attic and the basement, or to call in the pest control services. The latter are also effective for cleaning one apartment: if the ants appeared at home, after the call of exterminators, the owners need not do much about everything - all the work will be done by professionals. But usually such pleasure is more expensive than the option of self-struggle.

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

 

Preventive measures

In order for ants not to appear in the house (including again, after a successful destruction procedure), it is necessary to block the ways of their penetration here and organize preventive protection of the room. For this:

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

It is also useful to periodically communicate with neighbors. If any of them fight with ants or complain about them, you should always be alert and be ready for quick action at the first insects penetrate 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 chose to create their anthill in the house

 

An interesting video: why home ants are difficult to bring out and how to fight them all the same