Ants moving out of heat, drought … and into your home

By Christine Anne Piesyk | August 26, 2007 |

Ants. They’re not usually a major problem. More of a minor irritation. But excessive heat and the combination of that prolonged heat and extreme drought is sending these critters scurrying right into your home — even if you haven’t had big problems with them before. They are hungry and thirsty, and just looking a place to beat the heat and get well fed in the process. Are you an unwitting four star hotel for a local ant colony?

First, the basics. Ants come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from the carpenter ants who consume the wood framing of your home as if it were prime rib, to fire ants that make their presence known by, among other things, biting you. And then there are those pesky little brown ants who normally converge in small mounds in your backyard or in the cracks in the sidewalks and around foundations.

With the record-breaking heat wave, though, the ground is cooked, the pavement is hot enough to fry eggs on, vegetation is dead or dying, and rainfall is non-existent for the time being, which leaves ants hot, hungry and thirty. So what’s a poor ant to do? Go visiting.

Now, I’m not against ants; they have their place in the strata of life on earth. I just don’t want them in my kitchen.

If you’re not careful those visitors will be on the way to permanent residency. Without a Visa. But there are steps you can to minimize the intrusion, remove it altogether, and implement preventive measures that can keep most intrusions from recurring. «Read the rest of this article»

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