Should You Squish Ants in Your House?
- 15 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Hey, neighbor! It’s Sean with LOCAL Bug Guy!
Ants. Ants everywhere. One of the most common pests in North America. And they’re oh so eager to get in your home.
But once an ant enters your home, is it safe to squish it? What should you even do when you find ants? This post will provide some answers.
If you’d like a pro to handle your ants, contact us at LOCAL Bug Guy! We’ve been helping residents near Wildomar, California, and Springville, Utah keep their houses free of ants and other common pests for years. We’ll give you a quick, no-BS quote, and then we will assign you a dedicated, highly trained pest control tech.
Is it safe to squish ants in my house?
This might surprise you, but no. You shouldn’t squish ants in your house.
“But Sean, when you find a bug in your house, you squash it! That’s what you do, right?” Nope. Not in this case. And I’m gonna tell you why.
When you squash a common household ant like a carpenter ant or Argentine ant, they release emergency pheromones that work like a distress signal. It tells the rest of the colony that there’s been danger. So the colony responds. Squishing ants can cause other ants to come to the scene of the crime, investigate, or fight back. So essentially, by squishing ants, you get more ants.
Bottom line: don’t squish ants if you can help it.
If I shouldn’t squish ants, what the heck am I supposed to do about them?
Three things. One, make sure your house is properly sealed. Two, use bait to get rid of the colony. And three, protect your house with an anti-insect spray.
You’re finding ants in your house because they’ve been able to sneak in somewhere. Most likely, you have a door that isn’t properly sealed. Check the door sweep and weather stripping for your exterior doors. Can you feel a draft? If the answer is yes, you’re providing ants an entrance. Same goes for windows, too. Especially windows that are low to the ground. Take a trip to your hardware store and get the necessary materials to make sure drafty doors and windows are sealed. You’ll be amazed at how this will keep ants from crawling in.
If you’re still finding ants in your house after fixing your doors and windows, it’s time to whip out bait. Ant bait is specially made to attract ants—it feels like food to them. But the bait is also laced with poison that will make the ants sick. So the ants come running, they take loads of “food” from the bait trap, then they share it around their colony. Before long, the colony is wiped out. RIP ants.
Once there are no more signs of ants in your house, it’s time to use an anti-insect spray. We recommend Ortho Home Defense or a similar product at least once per season. Spray the outside foundation of your home, around the edges of doors and windows, and occasionally your inside baseboards. These sprays create a barrier around your home that repulses insects, so they’ll be sent packing instead of entering your house.
Following these steps will do a lot more to rid your house from ants than squishing them one by one.
Let us handle it
We know that’s a lot of work. If you’d rather let us do the heavy lifting, we’d be happy to do that for you.
When you join the LOCAL Bug guy family, you’ll get the name, phone number, and email address of your personal pest control tech so you can contact them for help whenever you need. But we’ll treat your home at least once every season to make sure common pests like ants, wasps, and spiders stay far away. Contact us below for a free quote!
Comments