Ants: They Don't Make Great Pets
Spring Valley Ant Infestation
When you have an infestation of ants in Spring Valley, the awful truth you need to understand is that you are only seeing a tiny fraction of the number of ants that have invaded your property.
What you are seeing are the worker ants that have been sent out from the nest to scout for food. When they find it, they head back to the nest with a morsel of food, leaving a trail of pheromones for other ants to follow. Pretty soon, you have a supply line of ants scurrying fast in both directions.
And they will find food, whether it's a crumb dropped from your table, some food left out (even if covered) or simply a dead insect.
The thing is that there is little point in killing the visible ants. To get rid of your Spring Valley ant infestation, you must kill the queen, along with the eggs that the workers are getting ready to hatch.
And, of course, the queens of other nests in the vicinity as well.
This is where your Spring Valley pest control expert comes in. They have the equipment, tools, techniques and safe insecticides to get rid of your ant infestation for good.
Spring Valley Ants Ate My Silk Moths
When I was a kid of around 11 years of age, we had a silkworm craze, usually started by a kid with a backyard mulberry tree.
We would put a few silkworms with some mulberry leaves for them to eat in a shoe box with holes punched in the lid for oxygen and then watch the fascinating silkworm life cycle, topping up with fresh leaves every couple of days or so.
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They didn't mind the odd lettuce leaf or beetroot leaf as well (though interestingly, I've never seen this documented anywhere; the diet is supposed to be pretty much just mulberry leaves).
Anyway, the little guys would feed voraciously and constantly for about 3 weeks and then build themselves a silk cocoon. The silk was normally yellow but had a greenish sheen if the diet included lettuce leaves or a pinkish sheen if it included beetroot leaves.
It was fascinating to watch the silkworm swing its head back and forth as it excretes the silk and builds the cocoon. The cocoon is made from one continuous strand of silk that can be a kilometer long!
The worm would then undergo metamorphosis as it changed from a worm to a pupa to a silk moth. As a result of thousands of years of domestication, silk moths can't fly, so there were no issues in keeping them in the shoe box. They only live for about a week, during which time the males and females will mate and the female will lay between 300 and 500 eggs, ready to begin the cycle all over again.
In the normal course of events, the moth will eat its way out of the cocoon, rendering the silk useless.
With a great deal of patience, it was possible to find the end of the silk and unwind it onto an empty cotton reel. The pupa thus revealed could be buried just below the surface of a container of flour, where it would continue to develop into a silk moth.
The other option of killing the moth by dropping the cocoon into boiling water wasn't something we 11 year olds were prepared to do.
Ants Found My Silk Moths
Unfortunately, ants found my silk moths a couple of days after they emerged from their cocoons.
I opened the shoe box to see all my precious moths covered with ants, half-eaten and fluttering about in distress.
I killed them all immediately, of course and haven't been too fond of ants ever since.
Spring Valley Pest Control: Getting Rid of Ants
Ants can spread dangerous bacteria and, while not in the same class as termites (see my post Watch Out for Termites) can still cause structural damage to your home.
And while your best bet for getting rid of an ant problem quickly and permanently is to call in your Spring Valley pest control expert, there are some things you can do yourself.
Queen of the Ant Colony
To solve an ant problem, you need to first eliminate the ones you don’t see to get rid of the ones you do see. It sounds strange, but it's true. This is because the queen (who lays all the eggs and is the mother of all the ants) never leaves her nest. She just stays there, being fed by the workers (the ones you see) and continues to reproduce more ants. So you can spray and spray the workers, while the queen will keep producing more to take their place. Your Spring Valley pest control ant specialist understands how all this works and takes advantage of it to get rid of all the ants permanently.
Don't Spray the Visible Ants
Queen Ant
The ants that you see are worker ants. Their job is to find food and take it back to feed the queen and her young, who are being groomed as the next generation of worker ants. Because of this, these worker ants are your ticket into the colony. If you spray and kill these ants, the colony will simply send out more workers, and you'll never reach the queen. The only way to eliminate an ant colony is to kill the queen. And even then, it's possible that the workers have a queen-in-waiting and you'll only get a temporary respite.
Use Ant Bait
Instead of eliminating the worker ants, use them! Following all label directions, place ant bait stations along the trail you identified. The workers will find the bait, carry it back to the nest, and feed the queen, eventually killing her and eliminating future populations. At least from that particular queen!
While general cleanliness is an important part of managing an ant problem, you don't want to mop away the ant's odor trail until you've eliminated the colony. Take advantage of the trail to lead the ants to your bait. When the ants are gone, you can clean the trail area thoroughly.
The ants will carry the insecticide bait back to the nest, but it can take several days to eliminate the colony, or even a few weeks if the colony is very large or it has several queens, as some ant species do.
Replace the bait station if the ants empty it.
Hopefully, you'll never have an ant swarm like this.
But if you do have a Spring Valley ant infestation, don't try to tackle it yourself. Call your Spring Valley pest control ant expert immediately.