Ants thrive inside dirty homes, not because they love filth and trash, but because clutter and garbage mean extra food and drinks to scavenge. For this reason, we recommend thoroughly cleaning your home once a week and addressing food messes and drink spills as they occur around your living areas.
Keeping food out of reach, cleaning up every day and being neat is a great way to prevent ants from invading, but it's not always a sure way of keeping them out.
The most common food sources that draw ants inside your home are the sweetest: spilled drops of soft drinks or fruit juices, candy, jellies and jams, cookies and other sweet baked goods, honey and syrup, and over-ripe fruit are some of their favorites. A zealous group of ants will even carry off a wad of chewed gum.
Although ants are attracted to almost all types of human food, they are particularly drawn to sweets such as honey, candies, jellies, or syrup. Food spills, scraps, and messes are also tempting sources of foods. Garbage is another food source for ants.
Why Do Ants Suddenly Appear In Kitchens? A sudden ant infestation in your kitchen means there is a food source somewhere. The food can be honey, sugar, syrup, meat, fats, breadcrumbs, etc. Once the ants determine these food sources, they form long trails to connect their colonies to the food source.
Two of the best ways to eliminate ants are Borax and diatomaceous earth. Essential oils, including peppermint and clove, are a natural way to repel and kill ants. Food and moisture attract ants, so keep your home clean and dry to get rid of ants permanently.
Peppermint is a natural insect repellant. You can plant mint around your home or use the essential oil of peppermint as a natural remedy for control of ants. Ants hate the smell, and your home will smell minty fresh! Plant mint around entryways and the perimeter of your home.
Straight white vinegar makes a great ant spray. You can saturate ant trails to kill on contact, or spray counters and other areas and either wipe up after a few minutes or allow the treatment to dry in place.
In most cases, it's the presence of food and water that brings ants inside. This applies in the bedroom just as much as it does in the kitchen. Clean your entire home thoroughly, washing your bedding and any dirty clothes in the room, then vacuuming thoroughly to remove food debris from the carpet.
Moisture: Ants require a water source to survive and can even store water for later within their colonies, so they will return to the same home again and again if there is moisture available.
The good news is that ants can still smell Vinegar after it is dried. Always remember that Vinegar is not a permanent solution to remove an ant infestation. It is reasonable to spread the solution thrice a week over the affected areas to remove ants slowly.
One of the most common ways to tell if you have an ant infestation in your wall cavities is by listening for the sound of crawling ants in the affected wall. This sound can be soft scratching and the sound of gnawing as they eat away on the wood inside your wall.
Erase The Ant Scent Trails
Simply sweeping and mopping your floors won't help to eliminate the scent trail that ants leave behind. Instead, mix up vinegar and water and spray areas where ants have been. Another recommendation is to use an Ammonia based cleaner to clean up the pheromone trail.
For the same reason, ants won't cross a chalk line. Their pheromone trail is being temporarily disrupted, causing them to search in a different direction to find the trail again.
Cayenne pepper or black pepper
Create a wall of pepper around the area where ants are entering. Much like vinegar and cinnamon, the insects can't stand the strong smell. Alternatively, you can also try mixing pepper with water and creating your own homemade cost-effective spray.
Windex, the glass cleaner, is a known insect killer. When you have an ant swarm in your house, spray them all with Windex and they will die nearly instantly. Windex can also eliminate some of the scent trails that ants follow to find food.
Moth Butterfly
The female moth butterfly will lay its eggs inside the ant colony or nest, and once the larvae hatch, they will feast on the ants. Unfortunately for the ants, moth butterfly eggs are oval and have a hard exterior, making them too heavy and impenetrable for the soldier ants.
A white vinegar and water solution is a common method to wipe out ants for good. Ants don't like the smell of vinegar. It not only repels them; it can also kill them. Depending on how much you can bear the smell, mix at least one part vinegar and three parts water.
While many people believe that salt is an effective way to get rid of ants, the truth is that salt may only temporarily repel certain species ants, rather than kill them. Ants live in a colony often consisting of thousands of ants.