Exterminate Pavement Ants – Spring is the Key Time.
It’s spring at last! Think we’re happy? Guess who is just as happy? Pavement Ants. They are cold-blooded creatures, and therefore cannot be active during the winter months. As the weather begins to warm up in March, April and May, pavement ants begin to wake up.
Exterminate Pavement Ants – Know Their Habitat
Pavement ants love to create nests and satellite nests in the safety of the area under a slab of stone or concrete. This is why you are likely to find pavement ants emerging from underneath a patio, or from a crack in the sidewalk or the cracks between the stones of your front walk. For this reason, they’re hard to eliminate due to the inaccessibility of their colony.
Exterminate Pavement Ants – Know Their Behavior
To successfully eliminate pavement ants, it’s important to understand their behavior. Upon waking up to the warm temperatures of spring, pavement ants are extremely hungry, having lived off their inner food reserves during winter hibernation.
Exterminate Pavement Ants – Know Their Food Needs
What kind of food are they looking for? Pavement ants eat just about any type of food humans eat: Sweet, greasy, grains, fruits, seeds, meat…you eat it, so do pavement ants.
How are they looking for the food? Pavement ants normally follow scent trails left by their scouts. The trails lead to food sources. However, when they wake up in the spring, the scent trails have long since dissipated. Therefore, the pavement ants don’t know where their food sources exist. So, pavement ant scouts will wander about seeking food sources. When they find the food source, they will head back to the colony, leaving a scent trail as the go from the food source to the colony. The ants from the colony will then travel along the scent trail, creating a major freeway between the colony and the food source.
This is why spring is the best time to exterminate pavement ants. They’re hungry, disoriented from their food sources, scattered about searching, and their colony is not yet firmly established. Eliminate them now and you’ll possibly enjoy NO ANTS throughout the warm summer months.
Exterminate Pavement Ants – What to Do During the Spring Window of Opportunity?
Successful pavement ant extermination requires destroying all the ants in the colony, the eggs, and especially the queens (each colony has multiple queens). Once they emerge, swarm in their winged version and scatter about creating new colonies, extermination can be much more complicated, so you need to act in a timely manner.
Baits can be effective, due the the inaccessibility of the colony under some stone or concrete slab. The ants take the bait back to the queen, the bait is ingested, the ants die.
Exterminate Pavement Ants – Hire a Licensed Professional Exterminator
Since pavement ants create multiple colonies in inaccessible locations, each with multiple queens… and since they are extremely difficult to exterminate once firmly established…and finally, since the major window of opportunity in the spring is fairly brief, it’s important to call in an expert.
A licensed professional pavement ant exterminator knows the pavement ant’s habits, how to locate their colony, what bait to use, where to place it, and how to accurately assess the results. Your professional pavement ant exterminator will ensure that you don’t go through the summer months with ants appearing in the kitchen, climbing up your legs, spoiling stored cereal and pet food and contaminating your home.
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