The ant is a fascinating creature in terms of the social aspects that rule ant colonies.
They are extremely good at organising themselves, and by leading a coordinated co-existence over millions of years, they have now evolved to the point where they are able to successfully create huge colonies consisting of thousands of individuals, all with their own carefully assigned tasks.
Contents of this page
• What are ants?
• Black garden ant
• Pharaoh ant
• Ants and their way of life
• The ant is a known visitor
• How ants move around
• How ants communicate
• Do you have ants in your house?
• Quick ant control
• Environmentally friendly ant control
• Important to remember about ants
• Get professional help with ant control
5 quick questions about ants
Baking powder (soda), cinnamon and other types of household remedies can be used against ants, but it will only keep them away for a short period of time. The ants’ paths indoors can be disrupted using these methods, but if their source of food is not removed, the ants will simply find another way in.
A lesser known and gentler technique is to place large pots with sphagnum upside down on top of their main pathways on the lawn. The ants will seek the pots, and after about 3 weeks, a large amount of the colony will be located in the pots which can then be disposed of. Following this, boiling water can be dumped on the lawn to fight the rest of the colony.
To remove ants from a cavity wall or eaves of the house is particularly difficult. An effective technique would be to seek professional help and have them sprinkle insecticides around which the individual ant will then bring back to the colony.
Ants are multiannual and they spend the winter in their nests in deep, underground passages. They will search for environments that are frost-free, as frost in their nest will kill them.
Ants eat all types of food, especially sugary foods. They also drink, usually dew, but they also receive fluids through the foods they consume.
Ants in general
In this section, we will look at the general population of ants and what they are like.
They live in our gardens and mainly feed on sweet fluids they collect in the garden. They may also drain greenflies of a sweet fluid that is particular to this type of louse which the ant likes. It may sound somewhat bizarre, but there have been examples of ants keeping greenflies as pets. Ants can often be seen climbing up the stems of leaves. What they are doing is harvesting the sweet fluids that the greenflies contain. This almost symbiotic existence between ants and greenflies means that the ants are actually protecting the greenflies from predators such as ladybirds. Should a ladybird attempt to eat the greenflies, the ants will attack it en masse.
It is mainly the female ant that works for the colony and, therefore, also the female that collects food. The food is carried back to the ant nest which is underneath the house or terrace. It is not uncommon to find close to 8000 ants in an anthill or an ant colony. Ants live in social societies, small as well as large.
Near our homes they typically live underneath paving or along the foundation. Unfortunately for us, worker ants are incredibly good at finding their way into our homes. Ants have a very sweet tooth, so they will be attracted to anything sweet. They can appear in hundreds and really create a nuisance for the residents of the house. The queen ant spends the winter, for example, underneath the foundation of the house.
Black garden ant
The black garden ant is the most common species of ant found in Denmark. It is found by the thousands in our gardens, and in the natural surroundings around us. Worker ants are usually 4-5 mm in length, while queen ants can measure up to 15 mm in length.
In early spring, the ant emerges from its subterranean nest and starts searching for food. If you have ants in your house, you will usually notice spots where materials from the foundation or notches in tiles have been dug out. This is one of the best times of year to start your pest control efforts, as the ants will be hungry and will transport food, no matter what it is, down into the nest where activities are beginning again after the winter.
Pest control against flying ants
In autumn, and especially in late summer, you can often catch a glimpse of the well-known flying ants. This swarm of ants are queens that are leaving their colony to seek to places to establish a new ant colony. If you come across these swarms, it would be a good idea to try and get rid of them right away, although unlike methods that may have been used in the spring, here you will need to use insecticides for swarming insects.
Pharaoh ants
At 1.5 – 2 mm long, the pharaoh ant is quite small, and is slightly yellowish in colour. It was observed in Denmark for the first time in 1920, and only lives indoors in heated houses. The pharaoh ant, just like our regular ants, lives in social societies. A flat can, for example, house colonies of up to 100,000 ants at a time.
Be aware that the pharaoh ant can be a disease carrier and it is known for being omnivorous. On top of that, it can force its way through things like bandages, making it deeply unpopular with hospitals and hospital staff alike.
Pharaoh ants can be found everywhere in the home. If you notice pharaoh ants in your flat, you need to act immediately and contact a pest controller so the entire property can be examined. This is because this pest easily spreads from flat to flat through pipes etc.
It can be a difficult task to fight pharaoh ants in a larger property, as this is a wasted effort if not all of them are exterminated.
Read more about the pharaoh ant here
Ants and their way of life
Many do not realise that early spring is the time to tackle your ant problem. If you have ants in your garden, you can begin by powdering or spraying where you find them.
The funny thing is that if you are working on a flower bed in early spring, ants will come crawling out. That´s because fresh sphagnum provides them with lots of great places to hide. Plus, it´s easy to dig in. So that is why a newly planted flower bed is often visited by a great number of ants.
Wake up the ants, and get to work. They dig and undermine terraces throughout the summer. So what you need to do is start fighting these pests in the springtime. Call Absolut Skadedyrsservice and speak to one of our experts to receive a non-binding quotation on pest control
The ant is a well-known visitor
Almost everyone in Denmark is familiar with the ant problem.
There really can´t be one single person who hasn´t had fun playing with ants as a child, or cursed them as an adult. Many ant species thrive in Danish gardens, and naturally forests and meadows are full of them, too, but obviously the most important thing is to treat the ants in your garden.
They can make quite a nuisance of themselves in the garden, and even more so when they find their way inside, where they can easily be found under floors and in cavity walls – colonies have even been found up in the eaves on houses.
How ants move around
When ants swarm, there can be thousands of them, and when they do, there will also be many extra birds and larger insects in the air. When the large swarms of ants occur, they fill the air with thousands of flying ants, on their way to establishing new ant colonies.
How ants communicate
Ants “talk to each other” via pheromones that tell them when the time is right to fly off and discover new areas.
Actually, an ant can fly up to several kilometres, although only very few of them go that far. The few ants that manage to leave their starting point without being eaten may be lucky enough to get caught in the wind and carried a long way.
Ants obviously also move around by crawling, but that is normally in order to service the ant colony in some way and, here, it is the worker ants that ensure the survival of the other ants in the colony.
Do you have ants in your house?
Some people claim that ants can even undermine a house, but this is only a myth.
The regular black garden ant, which is what we are talking about here, cannot undermine a house, although it is not unusual for ants to dig themselves in underneath the foundation of the house. Here, they dig passages that may partly collapse but will subsequently be restored by other ants.
In regard to undermining an entire house, ants are simply too small to create the network of passages that would be required underneath a foundation to present any risk to the house.
Ants dig many passages, but do not pose a risk
However, there are always exceptions to the rule. But it is incredibly rare that houses collapse into ant passageways. The problem occurs when floors or terraces sink, which would certainly be ranked as a K1 on any surveyor´s report on a home.
There are very few examples of ants that have dug a nest and used it for decades. However, in those that do exist, the passages may be several meters deep.
One of the worst examples in history concerns ants that extended the same nest over a period of 100 years. Here, an excavator was needed to remove the entire ants’ nest after all the ants had been exterminated by a powerful insecticide. This enormous ants’ nest contained millions of ants and covered a huge area. However, it is extremely rare for an ant colony to remain active for so many years, so the idea of it ever posing an actual threat to humans is totally unrealistic.
The regular ants in the garden are not a nuisance to properties, or the like. Ants, however, can be a nuisance when they get into food or into the house, which can be very annoying. The good news is that these ants can be controlled.
Indoor ant control
Absolut Skadedyrsservice have a great deal of professional expertise and experience in fighting ants indoors – and other pests in general. Contact us for free guidance on what to do here and now, or order our ant pest control service so we can help you rid your home of pests professionally and efficiently – once and for all.
Ant control
The most important thing when exterminating ants is to remove the ants’ nest, but it is often an impossible task, as the ants usually choose to live under paving or underneath the floor in the house.
It is almost impossible for the private individual to get rid of garden ants as over-the-counter products do not have any long-term effect.
Absolut Skadedyrsservice uses products with a long-lasting effect, and it is actually the ant itself that carries the insecticide into the nest. Absolut Skadedyrsservice have the professional expertise and experience in ant, and pest control in general, to get the job done. Contact us for free guidance and information on how we can help with ant control. Our products are approved by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and are odourless, so you can be back in your home 10 minutes after the treatment is finished.
Quick ant control
Getting rid of ants is not that easy, since they often dig their way underneath terraces or below the foundations of the house. Another favourite place of theirs is under rotten tree stumps. What all ant nests have in common is that ants will always look for food in their surrounding environment.
This often means that ants will enter the house – either by following channels that house water pipes or other channels that lead into the house that might have small cracks in or near them.
Ants follow these man-made passages, and then go on to expand them, so that other ants can make use of them, too.
Here – after the ants have made their way into the house – you may find that the ants have been entering the house through small cracks along the skirting boards. The access points can be identified by grains of sand and other tiny droppings left behind after the ants’ digging. If the ants discover crevices in the foundation, other ants will help expand them expand them.
Most of the ants that then enter the house can be controlled with ant killer dusting powder that you can buy at DIY centres. Remember NOT to use insecticides in places where you store or handle foods.
If the ants are located where you store or handle food, you need to treat them with an insecticide that is approved. It does exist, but the effect is not very long-lasting. The poison can be distributed a number of times. However, it is important not to use stronger insecticides against ants on things like the kitchen counter.
Remember that this where you and your family eat and prepare food – on the kitchen counter.
Environmentally friendly ant control
• Ants keep greenflies as pets
• A swarm of flying ants signals they are on the move
• Ants cannot undermine your house
• Control ants with insecticides and concrete
Get professional help with ant control
Are you swamped with ants? Then call Absolut Skadedyrsservice and hear more about how we can exterminate ants and their nests. If you cannot get rid of the ants in your home and garden, then contact us. We´ve been doing this for a number of years – we specialise in ant control. Absolut Skadedyrsservice uses both traditional and untraditional methods in ant control, and we make use of safe insecticides during the treatment. We can effectively fight your ants both indoors and outdoors and we also remove ants from their nest. You can call us at any time during the day. Our 6 specialists are on hand and are ready to visit your home, if you need to remove ants from your terrace or house.
