Little brown ants invading my kitchen counter top!?
The house is 12 years old. I have NEVER had ants in my house. Now, after hiring a pest control service (Western) in May ’09 for a few inside wasps, in August, I saw one little brown ant on my kitchen counter 2 days ago. Yesterday, Western came by for a 3 month check; they marked their sheet (without my telling them anything) that they found ants (surprise!); they sprayed yesterday (outside) and, today, I had about 100 little brown ants on my kitchen counter. We are very clean (just me and my husband) and don’t leave anything out. However, today, my “momo” husband had some sorbet, of which he dripped on the counter (of course, without cleaning) and when I came home from work, I found the first 20 ants licking it up. After that, I found about 5 in my dishwasher (so I ran the dishwasher), and found, here and there, another 5, 10, 20. And it sucks b/cuz my counter i that speckled dark brown granite so it’s really hard to see them! WHAT THE HECK SHOULD I DO????
June 25th, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Give it a couple more days and then call the exterminator back out. They may not have gotten all the ants outside. Or, there could just be residual ants in the house from the initial invasion.
Ants don’t live in your house. They live outside and come inside to forage for food and water. When they find it, they lay down a trail of pheromones that the other ants follow in a conga line. Spraying surfaces to kill the ants in the line just kills the immediate ants in the vincinity. But, the majority of the ants are back in the nest. Also, killing a nest doesn’t imediately kill residual ants inside. They’ll eventually get all disoriented without having a queen (if she got killed with the rest of the nest) and they’ll leave (or die).
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June 25th, 2011 at 7:34 pm
Have the same problem myself, ive tried it all to get rid of them. So now I just consider them pets and feed em about once a week, they really enjoy the coffee and sugar that I share with them, and we seem to have the same work schedules so its not an inconvenience to make sure they’re being taken care of, as it seems we will be spending the rest of our LIVES together. For funzies one time I gave them peanut butter, wish I could have seen the look on their faces. I even shot freon on em once just to change their climate conditions and hoping they would think it was winter. I venture to say that if we had a nuclear holocaust hit, they would still be there.
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