If you find sugar ants in your cabinet, chances are they found a sweet source of food to eat. Before you assume it’s sugar ants though, be aware that many types of these insects have a sweet spot for sugary substances. Finding them active in your kitchen might be disturbing, but the situation is easily managed by changing food storage habits and working with a trusted pest exterminator in your area.
Identifying Sugar Ants
Even though sugar ants live in natural locations like parks and forests, they like to colonize in suburban NYC areas too. When taking a walk around your property, you might find a nest in the ground where there are piles of dirt around the entrance. In the hotter summer months, sugar ants become visible in the streets or underneath a bright house light.
While many might think that all ants look alike, sugar ants do have some distinguishing features and work habits. Some common features to identify sugar ants are:
- 2 to 14 mm in size
- Males are usually black and winged
- Females have an orange-hued bodies
- Worker ants are typically orange with a bit of brown around their bodies
- Mostly forage at night and return to their colony before dawn
If you see these bugs crawling around your pantry, you should start checking all of your food packaging for small holes where they chewed their way inside. Contacting a reliable pest control service in your neighborhood is also a wise next step.
Treating and Preventing a Sugar Ant Problem
When you initially spot these ants, begin looking for where their entrance into your home is located. Look for cracks around your window sills, the floor, or other small spaces that would allow access, and seal those spots. You might have to do this part at night since these are nocturnal insects. You also need to figure out what their food source is and store it differently.
In addition to repairing any areas that they use as an entry point into your home, you should also take the following steps to prevent and treat your ant problem:
- Thoroughly clean your kitchen. Look for any areas that have small spills, crumbs, or greasy residue. This includes areas behind major appliances.
- Minimize their access to water. Since sugar ants rely on a source of water in addition to food, it’s important to keep your sinks, and tubs dry whenever done using them.
- Use ammonia-based glass cleaner to cut their trails. Ants rely on their pheromones trails to follow each other, so an ammonium-based glass cleaners work well in disrupting it.
- Switch and bait them. An excellent way to get these ants in one location to feed them poisonous bait is to first lure them to one area with a large amount of something sweet on a plate.
- Avoid using repellent sprays. Repellent sprays provide short-term relief and cause an uptick in the breeding cycle when the queen realizes her workers are dead. Bait is a better option.
- Work with an extermination professional. Avoid the hassle and seemingly never-ending battle against sugar ant infestations and hire an experienced exterminator to treat the issue.
Professional Sugar Ant Extermination
Many NYC residents try to treat a sugar ant problem on their own, but sometimes find it is impossible to solve the issue altogether. It’s important to speak with a pest control professional about this type of problem to get the best advice and treatment options possible. At My Private Exterminator, we save you a lot of time and frustration when trying to get rid of a persistent nuisance by handling the problem for you.
Our company is dedicated to offering the most effective pest control and extermination services in the industry. We have over 15 years of industry experience in treating ant problems in commercial, residential, industrial, and food locations. Our professionally-trained NYC exterminators eliminate sugar ant colonies at their source. Call us 24/7 at (347) 305-8524 to learn more about how our services can resolve your pest problem. You can also contact us online here.