How To Prevent Ants From Reappearing On Your Lawn
Once youve killed off any existing ant colonies, youll want to take steps to ensure that they dont reappear. Otherwise, you will be dealing with the exact same problem again in the next few months.
Ants thrive when your lawn is unhealthy. The more sparse your grass, the more room there is in the soil for ants to build their nests. If there is plenty of grass, and a small layer of thatch, this makes it difficult for ants to build their mounds.
Therefore, to prevent ant colonies from taking over your lawn, you need to take care of your lawn. This means taking steps such as:
- Watering your grass regularly if it isnt getting enough rain.
- Ensuring good drainage to prevent waterlogging.
You should also work to eliminate any potential ant food sources from your lawn, to avoid attracting them back to your garden.
- Keep your compost bin well-sealed. If you notice ant trails on or near it, quickly deter them with your choice of natural insecticide spray.
- The same goes for your vegetable patch. If you see ants nearby, or notice small bites taken out of the leaves, you will want to deter them as quickly as possible.
- Avoid leaving scraps of food on the lawn for birds or squirrels to eat. These animals wont pick up all the food every time, leaving crumbs that ants love to feast on.
How To Get Rid Of Flying Ants: 6 Tips After Britains Summer Insect Invasion
We bring you six top tips after people have been going crazy on social media about the seeming invasion of the pests
- 20:23, 2 Aug 2015
Social media has become swarmed with people creeped out by the invasion of flying ants over Britain.
Celebrities such as Eamonn Holmes and McBusted singer Danny Jones have joined hundreds in complaining about the pests.
Panic no more. Here are six top tips to help you tackle the little creatures head on.
How Do You Get Rid Of An Inch Ant Nest
A natural way to get rid of an ant nest is to put boiling water over it. Artificial methods like granules can be used to pour into crevices and cracks.
It is possible to spray a liquid on the nest or areas the ants might be attracted to, like cracks in the bark of a tree. Ants can be a nuisance, but they can also be an important part of the ecosystem.
If you want to keep ants out of your yard, youll need to do a little bit of work.
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How To Get Rid Of Ants Indoors
Some gardeners use sprays, powders and even boiling water to get rid of ants. Remember that ants are part of the garden ecosystem and are a vital source of food for other species, such as birds and amphibians. Sprays and powders contain insecticides which can harm other insects, such as bees, and which also leach into the soil and can harm soil invertebrates such as earthworms.
Here are some kinder, non-toxic methods of deterring ants, without harming them or the environment:
1. Locate the source of infestation
If ants are coming into your home, the most important thing to do is find out why. Try to see where they’re travelling to or coming from, which should alert you to the presence of an available food source â be it an open bag of sugar or jar of jam with the lid not fixed on properly. Once you have found the food source, remove it, and the ants should return outside.
2. Use vinegar to remove ant trails
Teams of ‘scout’ ants leave pheromones to alert other ants to the source of food. Simply sweeping the ants up won’t stop more turning up â you need to remove the pheromone scents left behind. To do this, use a few sprays of white vinegar solution and wipe with a damp cloth. This should destroy the pheromone trails and stop the ants in their tracks.
3. Deter ants with scented oils
To deter ants from your home, mix strongly scented peppermint or lavender oil with water and spray the mixture on to entry points like windowsills or door frames.
They Also Indirectly Affect Your Garden As A Whole
Ants like to feed off Honeydew which is secreted by Aphids as they feed on plant sap.
To keep a constant supply of Honeydew, ants protect aphids from predators like Ladybirds and tend to their ongoing needs. This protection often causes an increase in aphid activity all over your garden. This, in turn, leads to plants being damaged as theyre used as a source of food.
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Will Insecticides That Kill Ants Damage Your Lawn
Whether the insecticide treatment is going to damage your lawn or not depends on the type of insecticide. Several control solutions can harm your grass if they are not applied according to the given instructional manual.
You can also seek professional help from an ant exterminator to avoid potential destruction of your lawn. It is necessary to read complete instructions before the application of insecticide for positive results. Prepare the insecticide solution according to given guidelines and treat the infested area to control ant colonies. Some of the insecticides come with ready to use spray bottles.
The treatment with insecticides is good for highly infested areas. They kill the ants right after treatment and they are much cheaper than other ant killers. Still if not handled by professionals, there have been cases where people have destroyed their lawns with improper handling of the insecticides.
How Do I Find Ant Colonies
Ants are social creatures and live in large colonies. They are also hard workers and adhere to a rigid hierarchy. Ant colonies typically consist of a queen, who is responsible for laying eggs, males, whose primary job is mating, and worker ants. These take care of eggs while maintaining the nest and gathering food. One of the ways they do this is by burrowing tunnels to other areas.
Following trails of worker ants are one of the ways you are most likely to find the colony. Knowing where they like to hide is half the battle. The University of Missouri identifies four common types of ants and the most likely places for them to build colonies:
- Odorous house ants: While often found in homes, colonies are generally located outside. Look under stones, old bark, or areas of shallow soil
- Pavement ants: As their name implies, these can be found near sidewalks or paving stones
- Larger yellow ants: These nest in soil along your homes foundation
- Field ants: These include a variety of different species, including fire ants. They are easy to find due to their large mounds, which can measure up to one foot in diameter.
Carpenter ants are another common type of ant and one of the most destructive. Rather than spending time underground, they are likely to build colonies in decaying wood around your property or in old railroad ties used for landscaping.
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How To Kill Ants
When it comes to ridding your house or yard of an ant infestation, time is of the essence. Although ants rarely cause serious problems, they have the potential to damage property, sting or bite and carry diseases.
Whether you with a natural home remedy or commercial product or for help, read on to learn about the best ways to kill ants.
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How To Get Rid Of Ant Hills
Eliminating ants from your yard can pose a problem, especially if you have children or pets, as you may want to avoid using dangerous chemicals. While chemicals are generally more effective, there are natural recipes available to get rid of ant hills:
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Combine ½ teaspoon liquid dish soap, 1 ½ teaspoons of canola oil and 1 quart of water in a mixing bowl, then transfer solution over to a spray bottle. Spray area with high concentrations of ants and pour solution into the nest, killing ants.
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Another option is to pour 1 quart of white distilled vinegar into an ant nest, as the acidity kills ants on impact.
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Spread diatomaceous earth throughout your yard, focusing on areas that have a high concentration of ants and pouring it into the nest. Ensure you wear a dust mask for safety reasons upon application.
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Move The Colony Of Ants
Another very simple way to keep ants away, without using any treatment and without causing damage to your lawn is to locate the anthill and physically move it. If you cannot locate the anthill or if it is in a place that is difficult to access, you can also try to attract the ants at one point. For example, by putting a terracotta pot upside down to heat the soil and create the ideal environment for an ant hill.
Soap And Water Will Get Rid Of Ants
Soap and water are the most common cleaning substances that you can also use to clean out the ants in your beautiful lawn. Be sure to use eco-friendly soap so that your grass will not be adversely affected.
Just mix the biodegradable soap with water and put the mixture in a spray bottle and spray away. Concentrate the spray on the ant nest and spread some on their trails as well. You can also dump a good amount of this mixture into the nest to drown out the whole colony.
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What About Cinnamon Ant Control
Cinnamon treats all kinds of pests and I have done a complete report on its antifungal properties and discovered most people dont buy the real cinnamon. You can read more here: Cinnamon Does it Stop Damping Off in Seedlings?
Dr. Wizzie Brown, an entomologist at Texas AgriLife Extension has also tested cinnamon on fire ants and found no effect.
Cinnamon essential oil was tested and found to not only repel ants, but to also kill them, which may have led some gardeners to assume cinnamon works. This kind of incorrect use of scientific results is common. The research only looked at essential oils, a very concentrated form of cinnamon and all of this work was done in the lab. No field tests were done. This research, although interesting, tells us nothing about how cinnamon powder works in the field.
Ants And Essential Oils
Essential oils are extracts from plants that contain various chemicals in a concentrated form. The attraction for using these is that they are natural, and probably less toxic to humans than other pesticides.
Studies have found that various oils slow down the feeding behavior of fire ants, or reduce the number of workers sent to food, however, these effects are short lived and they dont cause the colony to move or to die out.
A lab study of Argentine ants found that essential oils did deter ants, but the effect was short lived.
It would be incorrect to assume that the plants from which these oils are extracted have any effect on ants.
Citrus oil extract has also been shown to work as a nest drench .
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Ant Treatment For Lawns Instructions
Small colonies of ants may not be detrimental for the health of your lawn or garden but they are an indication of the potential threat in the near future due to their rapid growth of colonies and exquisite mound-building capability all over the fields or lawns. Most of the ant species may not use grass or other plants as a food source but the established colonies of ants can significantly damage the root system of plants and can cause serious issues if not controlled earlier.
Each ant colony may contain one or more queens and the survival of a queen depicts the survival of a whole colony. Therefore, multiple well-managed treatments of insecticide are required to completely wipe out the ant infestation from your lawn. Now lets see how you can save your lawn!
What Is The Best Homemade Ant Killer
A mixture of dish soap and water: Make a mixture of dish soap or dishwashing liquid, put in a spray bottle and shake it well. Spray it on the ants. The solution will stick to the ants and the dish soap suffocates the ants to death. This spray can also be used to kill ants that are thriving on your plants.
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How To Distinguish Flying Ants From Termites
Flying ants and termites have very different body shapes. They also have different types of wings.
- The body shape of an ant has three distinct segments including a defined waist while a termite has a head and thick waist.
- Ants have one pair of long wings in front and one pair of short wings in back.
- Ants have bent antennae while termites have straight antennae.
- Termites have two pairs of equal length wings.
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How To Kill Ants Outside
This article was co-authored by Kevin Carrillo and by wikiHow staff writer, Hunter Rising. Kevin Carrillo is a Pest Control Specialist and the Senior Project Manager for MMPC, a pest control service and certified Minority-owned Business Enterprise based in the New York City area. MMPC is certified by the industrys leading codes and practices, including the National Pest Management Association , QualityPro, GreenPro, and The New York Pest Management Association . MMPC’s work has been featured in CNN, NPR, and ABC News.There are 9 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page.wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article received 13 testimonials and 80% of readers who voted found it helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 846,631 times.
A small number of ants located outdoors will not typically pose many problems, but when a massive infestation occurs or when the ants begin to sneak their way indoors, you will need to head outside and kill the colony at its base. Using either chemical pesticides or common household materials, you can get rid of an entire colony in a small amount of time!
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Borax Based Ant Killers
Borax and boric acid products were traditionally used as cleaning aids and as a cutting agent in many household products.
They are also useful in the war against ants, and they are now the base for many pesticides. Borax, a naturally occurring chemical compound, is incredibly toxic to bugs, plants, and fungi.
Effective against many ant species, it comes in powder form mixed with other ant attractant additives. This helps to mask it as a food source and encourage ants to ingest it.
How To Get Rid Of Ants Outdoors
If ants are nesting in your compost bin or beneath paving stones they are unlikely to be doing any harm, so do consider letting them get on with it. However, if they’re nesting in a plant pot and your plants are suffering, you can move them on by watering the pot regularly. Avoid completely flooding the pot, as this can kill the ants. But regular watering will let them know that the plant pot isn’t the best place to make a nest â as they do best in dry environments â so they will move their eggs elsewhere.
In this video, Alan Titchmarsh offers his tips on keeping ants out of your compost heap.
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Understand How Ants Live
Whether you’re dealing with ants indoors or out, it’s best to eliminate the ant nest versus simply repelling ants. Each ant colony can contain hundreds or thousands of members. Left alone, ant colonies multiply, and a small problem can become a nightmare pretty quickly.
Outdoors, it’s easy to spot an anthill in the lawn or on the pavement. The part of the anthill you see is just the tip of the ant colony iceberg. Colonies often extend 2′ to 3′ beneath the surface mound and another 2′ to 4′ around it! Indoors, it’s not easy to spot the nest, because ants tend to hide beneath floors, in walls or between cabinets.
Each ant colony includes at least one queen and worker ants. The colony survives as long as the queen lives. Whatever tactic you embrace to get rid of ants, aim to kill the queen. If your treatment fails and the queen lives, the colony can splinter and migrate, forming new colonies. If you only repel ants, they may exit one area, but will likely turn up somewhere else.
Shutterstock/Wong Hock weng
Where Is The Ant Nest
If you can’t easily find the anthill in your yard, you must do a bit of detective work. Since this species of ant loves sugar and fat, put a bit of each of these foods outside in areas where you have seen ants . If the bait is left untouched, switch it to another spot. Once the ants find it, they will create and maintain a path back to the nest.
The first method for destroying the nest is all-natural and can work effectively. Simply fill a pot with boiling water, add some liquid soap, and pour it right into the anthills entry point while the water is steaming. The writer from the Trussville Tribune also recommends boric acid, which can be sprinkled onto the entry point. You can even mix it with water and sugar to make it more appealing to the ground ants. However, keep in mind that boric acid is toxic to humans and pets.
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