Picture this: you get home from a long day at work and park your car. As you step out, you notice a trail of ants on the sidewalk leading past your house. That’s probably not going to make alarm bells go off in your head. Now pretend you see a trail of cockroaches instead. You’d probably be a little bit disconcerted and uncomfortable. If it was a group of mice, then you’d definitely be worried. However, if you realized just what kind of issues being overrun by ants could cause for your Dallas home, you might pay a little bit more attention to those tiny black marching lines running all over your property.
Dallas Ants At A Glance
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the common Dallas-area ants and the damage they can cause to your home and health.
- Fire Ants: With a stinging bite, these reddish-brown ants are a scourge to your yard, as they will create numerous outdoor nests and respond aggressively when disturbed.
- Carpenter Ants: These large, black or brown ants love to set up nests in the decaying wood of your home, creating further damage. They are mostly active at night and will bite when disturbed.
- Acrobat Ants: These medium-sized ants are a slightly larger version of the carpenter ant that is active during the day. They’ll cause damage as they nest in the wooden and insulation structures of your home.
- Pharaoh Ants: These little guys are the most invasive and most disruptive to your food supplies. Always on the hunt, tiny pharaoh ants work together to find the pantry and overrun any food that’s not properly stored. The biggest issue with the pharaohs is that common insecticides cause them to make more colonies within your home, so professional help is the safest way to go.
One of the easiest ways to spot ant activity in your home and recognize signs of an infestation is to pay attention to 4 possible occurrences:
- Infiltrated pet food
- Food that was left out (even crumbs) has been eaten or carried off
- Stray ants are walking around randomly on the hunt for food
- Anthill sightings around the foundations of your home and in the yard
Prevention Essentials
An ant infestation will get out of hand in a big hurry, so it’s important to do your part in deterring any ant activity within your home. The best way to do so is to maintain routine cleaning habits and get rid of any factors that may draw them into your home. This means properly storing all food and cleaning up thoroughly after meals. If anything is left on the counter or crumbs are left on the table, ants will sense them and begin to infiltrate. That’s when they’ll start looking for more and set up shop inside your home. Promptly cleaning up any spilled food or drinks will also help deter their activities. Remember, if the ants that scout around for food sources don’t find any to report back to their colony, then they’ll move on to another location.
You should also be especially careful with pet food and trash storage practices. If ants gain easy access to either, they’ll bring a whole mob back with them to begin looking for more opportunities for a sustainable food source.
Remember, many of these ants love to make a home in moist, rotting wood, so moisture maintenance is a must. Keep checking the foundations of your home for leaking pipes and faucets that may be creating a moisture problem in the areas of your home that don’t get a lot of attention.
Overwhelming Realizations
If you keep a clean home and stay on top of moisture-buildup issues, you might just have a chance to avoid ant infestations. However, there really aren’t many guarantees when it comes to any prevention. You’d have to carefully seal up every entry point. This means fresh calk on the window seals, weather stripping under all the doors, solidifying screen door entryways, and sealing any other small crevices through which these tiny pests could enter. When you begin to think about it, the amount of places they could get in is a bit overwhelming.
Instead of stressing about ant prevention all day long, you could call the Dallas-area home pest control and commercial pest control professionals at Greenforest Pest Control. Their friendly, expert pest technicians will provide the very best in ant prevention services or eradicate an existing infestation quickly and easily. There’s no reason to stress over ants in your Dallas home when there is affordable, professional help just one call away.