Solitary ant in kitchen
So sweeping my kitchen floor I found a solitary alive ant. The week prior the same thing. Only ever a single ant. Should I be worried? These are the only 2 ants I've seen. These ants were very small
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DADNSCAL
They’re scouts sent out to find a food source, and if they do, they’ll leave a scent trail that will bring the colony. Try to find where they’re coming in, an plug up the hole. Also, keep all food containers closed and don’t leave food out,
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Anonymous Post Author
Righton. Gonna have to pull the stove out. I'm sure there's some scraps back there. At what point do you think it'd be worth investing in a bug bomb? If it gets worse I mean
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DADNSCAL
Bombs are for flying insects. Get an ant & roach killer spray and spray it along the baseboards. Ortho Home Defense is a good one. If you live on the ground floor, spray outside along the walls also.
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Anonymous Post Author
Oh ok righton that's good actually cause I don't want to risk getting pesticide on my cast iron stuff. Thank you for the info!
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Boojum
I'm very leery of organophosphate pesticides, but it seems that Ortho Home Defence uses synthetic pyrethroids (the natural forms of pyrethroids occur plants of chrysanthemum family) so I wouldn't feel uncomfortable having that in the house.
We had constant problems with various species of ants every summer when we lived in Italy, and we used a home-brew, low toxicity method to control them: a mix of boric acid and powdered sugar. The ants carry this back to the nest, it gets shared around, eventually ends up getting fed to the queen, she stops laying eggs and the colony dies. It's not fast-acting, but it is very cheap and it does work.
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raisinbran
Smash it with a napkin and throw it in the trash. Keep an eye out for others, where there's one there are more finding their way into your house.
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olderdude-xx
Find where they are coming in and sprinkle cinnamon powder around that location. The ants will avoid it.
I found that I needed new cinnamon powder every year to keep them from coming in my back door.
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[Old Memory]
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1WeirdGuy
I wouldnt worry too much about it. Ants are pests but they are easier to deal with than say roaches or fleas.
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Vvaas
if you kill the ant don't leave the body there, when an ant dies it sets off a scent that attracts other ants to come and carry the body away
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Boojum
Always squash any solitary ants you see wandering in the house. That may sound heartless to some, but it's estimated that the total mass of living ants in the world is roughly the same as the total mass of living humans, so it's not like killing a few makes you an eco-terrorists.
Ants leave a scent trail wherever they walk. If that solitary ant finds something edible, it will head back to the nest with as much as it can carry. Any colleagues it encounters along the way will taste the food it carries, and then head down the trail it left behind looking for more. If there is more, then you'll soon have a solid convoy of ants heading for the food source and back to the nest. Once things get to that stage, only drastic, determined action will keep them away.
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