How Do You Get Rid Of Odorous House Ants In Your Kitchen?

Odorous house ants are a common kitchen pest. They will eat nearly anything, so any food that's left out in your kitchen or in the trash can attract them to your home. Odorous house ants are most notable for smelling like rotten fruit if you crush them, so they're easy to identify.

Thankfully, odorous house ants are not dangerous—they'll bite you if you disturb their nest, but the bite isn't painful or serious unless you're allergic to them. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to fully exterminate an odorous house ant infestation due to the fact that their colonies typically have multiple queens and multiple nests. To learn how to rid your kitchen of odorous house ants successfully, read on.

Use Slow-Acting Pesticides to Prevent the Infestation From Spreading

Slow-acting pesticides like bait traps are one of the best methods of killing odorous house ants. Fast-acting pesticides that kill on contact can cause a colony to become stressed, causing the queens to split off and find new nesting sites around your home. This can make your odorous house ant infestation more difficult to fully eliminate, so it's better to use slow-acting pesticides to exterminate your house ants.

Set Up Bait Traps to Eliminate Indoor Odorous House Ant Nests

Before setting up your bait traps, find out how the odorous house ants are getting into your kitchen. Workers will emerge from their nests, get food from your kitchen and bring it back to the rest of the ants. Following their trails will let you see where a nest is located.

Once you've found where the odorous house ants are coming from, place bait traps near the worker trails. After you've set up the bait traps, make sure your kitchen doesn't have any other food sources for the ants—you want them to eat the bait rather than eat the other food in your kitchen. Don't leave any dirty dishes in the sink, place all of the food in your pantry in plastic or glass jars and take the trash out as often as possible. 

When a worker ant takes the bait from the trap, it will share it with the rest of the nest. After a while, the ants in the nest (including the queen) will die. Since odorous house ant colonies have multiple nests, you'll have to use multiple bait traps in order to make sure every nest is being supplied with the poison bait. Set up a trap near every worker trail to make sure they will all be exposed to the poison.

Apply a Slow-Acting Perimeter Pesticide to Your Home's Exterior to Stop Future Infestations

You'll need to combine your bait traps with a slow-acting perimeter pesticide in order to fully eliminate the odorous house ant infestation inside your kitchen. When you have odorous house ants in your kitchen, there's most likely a larger colony outdoors that sent workers to your kitchen to forage for food. A perimeter pesticide will kill any odorous house ants that try to enter your home.

You can find a slow-acting perimeter pesticide at a home improvement store. Apply it to the ground around your home. Any workers the outdoor colony sends out to forage for food will be poisoned by the pesticide, and they'll slowly die. They won't be able to establish a colony in your home, which prevents your home from being invaded by any more odorous house ants.

To sum it up, combining bait traps with a slow-acting perimeter pesticide is one of the best ways to eliminate an odorous house ant infestation in your kitchen. The bait traps will eliminate the nests inside, and the perimeter pesticide will kill any house ants from the outside that try to establish new nests.

If you're having trouble finding the right bait and pesticide to use to eliminate your infestation, contact a residential pest control service in your area—such as Rat Pack Pest Control, Inc. Professionals can help to select the right traps and spray the perimeter of your home with a slow-acting pesticide that will effectively eliminate your indoor house ants and discourage them from returning.


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