Red ants in the apartment

At different times of the year and in different regions of the country, representatives of various species of ants can often be found in an apartment, and even more so in a private house. Very often, ants in an apartment are occasional guests brought on clothes or with things. Among them are insects of different sizes and colors.

However, the only pest in the apartment is really the so-called pharaoh ant - an independent species of heat-loving small ants, which in our latitudes in addition to residential heated premises can not live anywhere. These red ants in the apartment are a real problem: they are numerous, spoil the products, can carry pathogens of various diseases, and besides, they are removed with great difficulty.

From the majority of their relatives, typical apartment ants are very small in size - about 2 mm in length, light brown or reddish body color and low speed of movement.In addition, small ants in an apartment are usually very numerous and come across in the eyes of entire detachments moving along special paths.

Large red ants in the apartment are occasional guests, they are usually found singly and run so fast that it is very difficult to catch them.

On a note

The most reliable sign of the pharaoh ant is its activity in the winter. Already at zero temperature on the street, all domestic ants go to anthills for wintering. And if an ant is greeted indoors this season, it is definitely a pest.

In the photo - apartment ants in the nest. The large ant in the center is the uterus:

In a colony of domestic ants can live a few dozen queens and up to 350 thousand working individuals.

The reasons for the fact that the red ants appear in the apartment, although few in number, but can occur in almost any house. That is why the small red ants successfully conquer more and more new areas and are more likely to appear in any apartment, even the cleanest.

On a note

White or transparent ants do not occur in the apartment. Among adult ants there are no insects with this color.White ants in an apartment can be found only in the anthill itself - the newly born ant has just left the cocoon and has a soft shell of light for the first few hours of life. But in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan there are termites that actually have a white body color. So those people who talk about white ants in their home usually actually deal with termites.

 

How ants get into the apartment

Considering the reasons for the appearance of ants in the apartment, you should separately talk about wild ants - the inhabitants of gardens, fields and forests - and domestic pharaoh ants.

Forest red ants, large black field ants, reapers or slender garden black ants appear in the apartment by chance and for several reasons:

1. They are accidentally recorded on clothing or equipment from the street. In this case, it cannot be said that ants appeared in the apartment: meetings with such aliens are rare, and they will not be able to survive in the room for a long time.
2. Ants can wander into the apartment from the street in search of food. In this case, the insects do not occupy the premises either: their nest remains on the street, and only foragers looking for food penetrate into the apartment.

In the first case, no measures can be taken at all, and a found ant or several should simply be thrown out the window. The second situation is more complicated: if street ants meet regularly in an apartment, you need to do everything necessary to eliminate the places where they enter the room. For example:

• to trace through what gaps insects get into the apartment, and caulk them
• process doors and windows by special means
• check the floors on the balconies, ventilation shafts and points of entry and exit of pipes in the apartment - perhaps the ants are entering the room from the neighbors. Found "gates" are treated with insecticides or plastered with putty.

Feedback

“Ants never start in our apartment. But as her husband returns from the apiary once a week, several bags constantly creep out of his bag and clothes. And sometimes pincer earwigs and odorous green bugs. The whole zoo is shorter. I just throw them out the window. ”

Alla, Tula

It’s another thing if small ants appeared in the apartment, sometimes coming across whole columns. There is no need to wonder why they suddenly decided to occupy an apartment: a person’s housing is the only suitable habitat for them, here they are looking for food and multiply.

It is much more sensible to find out where the ants in the apartment come from: perhaps, to combat them, they will have to cooperate with their neighbors, and after hatching they will cut off the path of repeated penetration into the room.

So where do ants come from in an apartment? There may be several options:

• from neighboring apartments
• from front doors, refuse chutes and dryers
• from the basements
• from attached homes
• from a remote location on a person’s clothing or with various household items — in this case, the start of a new colony can only be given by an accidental “womb-traveler,” and therefore this is the rarest path.

The spread of ants is the key to the survival of their colonies. Moreover, Pharaoh's ant has one colony with nests connected with each other on several floors of a house in dozens of apartments.

In the photo - red ants on the so-called "forage" path. On such paths, ants carry food to the nest:

Feedback:

“The first time ants noticed about six months ago. A few pieces in the bathroom. I didn’t worry too much, because I had never had them before. Ants were bred in the apartment about a month later: first in dozens and then in whole packs they ran around the kitchen,along the baseboards, on the balcony, even in the bedroom they were met. I had never known before where ants could appear in an apartment. Began to understand, it turned out that the neighbors the same trouble. And this is in the house, which was commissioned a year ago! We found out that all the ants came from the supermarket at the house. Moreover, the supermarket administration itself mowed them two months ago, and their descendants were already divorced in our apartments. ”

Inna, Ulyanovsk

 

What attracts ants to the room?

All that ants need in an apartment is food and warmth.

As natives of tropical Asia and North Africa, brown, red or yellow ants in an apartment are very thermophilic: they cannot live and reproduce at temperatures below 15 ° C. That is why this species does not occur in nature in our country. Yes, and in the apartment ants start, just moving from another room or being accidentally brought on clothes.

Feedback:

“I can’t imagine where the ants come from in the apartment. We have a fine mesh for ventilation, reliable doors, PVC windows. There is no gap anywhere. I watched them, they all run for the baseboard. But we also put the plinth after the repair, there were no slots under them ... "

Anna, Saint Petersburg

In addition, small red ants in the apartment start up when scouts from nearby nests regularly bring food from the premises. This is for insects a signal that the apartment will be a great place for a new colony.

On a note

There are cases when, in a house completely infected with ants, one or two apartments were completely clean of them. As it turned out, perfect cleanliness was constantly maintained in these rooms, and the ants simply could not find food.

An additional factor that will make the apartment even more attractive for the colonialists is the presence of a sufficient number of places for arranging nests - holes, slots, obstructions of old things. However, even without this, small yellow ants in an apartment can quite successfully occupy a room.

In the photo below you can see domestic ants in their nest:

 

Are ants dangerous in the apartment?

Small ants do not carry a direct danger to a person in an apartment: they do not bite and do not cause allergies. Even the rather vicious forest ants that accidentally got into the room are unlikely to cause serious trouble. But they can bite sensitively enough.

Nevertheless, red ants in an apartment can cause some harm:

• they spoil the products and carry dirt on them from other rooms. It is especially dangerous if the same individuals move between the garbage chutes and kitchens.
• Small red ants in an apartment can be carriers of pathogens of dangerous diseases. For example, on the paws of ants they found eggs of worms, and it is theoretically possible for ants to carry the plague pathogen.
• Ants constantly take out the garbage from their nests to special “dumps” hidden behind plinths, carpets, and plaster - in general, in inaccessible places. There are accumulated remnants of the bodies of dead ants, uneaten food, feces. Such landfills are an ideal place for the development of mold fungi and flea larvae. As a result, red ants help other pests to live.

In general, small ants in an apartment are a sign and one of the factors of unsanitary conditions. Only by this they are dangerous and can contribute to the deterioration of the hygienic condition of the home. And therefore at the first meetings with them it is necessary to begin a serious and systematic struggle.

 

Fighting ants

Ants are one of the most difficult to remove pests because of the centralized location and the large number of nests, high fertility and the ability to feed on a huge variety of products.

Nevertheless, it is possible to fight with room ants. The most well-known methods for their elimination are:

• call specialized teams of pest control. The way is expensive, but simple: the specialists themselves will arrive, they will process the whole room and explain how and when after this it is necessary to carry out the cleaning.
• The use of insecticidal aerosols - in fact, the work of a specialized service with their own hands. Red ants are dying from the means of Raptor, Combat, Off, Raid, from any aerosols against bedbugs.
• The use of insecticidal dusts, gels and pencils - although these tools do not give an instant effect, they can be used for a long and systematic baiting of ants indoors.
• The use of borax and boric acid to combat ants. This is the most famous folk method, consisting in the preparation of poisoned baits.

It is important to remember that fighting ants only in one apartment obviously doomed to a temporary effect: even if you destroy all the nests in your room,over time, ants from neighboring apartments will enter the apartment. Reliable results are provided only by the cooperative efforts of the residents of the house.

To prevent ants from appearing again in the apartment, it is necessary to observe preventive measures against them: keep the room clean and do not leave open food on the tables, periodically process the door and window boxes with insecticidal pencils, destroy single scouting ants, and carry out wet cleaning regularly. With such prevention, the probability of pests entering the apartment (including cockroaches) will be minimal.

 

Interesting video: an example of an apartment teeming with ants

 

Ants torture tenants of an apartment building for 5 years