Besides your lawn, ants habitually invade homes to reach the food in your kitchen and pantry.
Consider using ant traps for kitchen counters or pantries to keep your food and home safe. You can eliminate the ants indoors and even discourage future infestations.
Keep reading to learn more about DIY options you can try at home!
We all know how common ants are in your kitchen, but why do they end up there?
Ants are primarily driven by a need to provide for and protect their colony. Workers will forage outdoors for leftover food or small, weaker insects. Aphids or other ants typically fall victim to these pests, while swarms of workers demolish larger insects.
But ants don’t just eat outdoors! Just like us, ants like to search around for different places to eat, and your home is often the hottest restaurant in town!
While they can appear anywhere indoors, kitchens, pantries, and bathrooms are usually hotspots for ant infestations. Bathrooms have enough moisture to keep carpenter ants happy, while pantry cabinets are rife with spilled and stored goodies for any species.
Ants tend to flock to kitchens because of food availability. Even the cleanest of kitchens can suffer from ant infestations. These tiny pests can easily sniff out forgotten crumbs or dried spills and encourage other colony members to follow suit for a good meal.
Homes with numerous exterior cracks or crevices leading indoors can encourage ants to sneak in. While it’s unlikely that you’ll experience an infestation following a day of no cleaning, it’s good to remember that ants are persistent and may visit if you have food available.
Ants traps are one of the best ways to attract and capture ants whenever you have an infestation in your home.
Because most ants head toward food sources, they’ll stick around spaces in your kitchen with easy access to the items they want.
Be careful about placing certain pesticides or poisons near the food you plan to consume.Remember to keep certain products away from children and pets to ensure their safety.
Not every trap needs multiple moving parts! Small sticky traps can do the trick if you’re looking for a relatively cheap and easy solution to a minor insect infestation.
While typically recommended for larger pests like cockroaches, centipedes, or spiders, these traps can easily capture groups of foraging ants in place.
Typically made of cardboard, these products have a thin sheen of glue or adhesive applied to the surface. Some are simple sheets, while others are enclosed to prevent you from seeing all the creepy creatures inside.
You can apply a storebought ant bait or a dollop of food to the middle of the sticky sheet to encourage ants to climb aboard. Peanut butter, honey, jelly, or dipping sauces should be enough to attract these tiny insects.
Check out this article to learn how to create DIY sticky traps!
Placing these sticky traps around food or other places that ants frequent can help eliminate the ones you see, but you’ll typically need something else to entice the ants onto the pads.
Something as simple as a water bottle can be the perfect base for your next pest control solution. Ant traps for kitchen spaces aren’t always complicated!
After you’ve finished drinking from a plastic water or soda bottle, fill the bottle with syrup or molasses; any thick or sticky sweet substance will do! Then, mix either borax or boric acid into your chosen liquid.
Make sure to fill the bottle up just enough so the ants will have to climb down into the trap to reach their sweet treat. As ants enter the bottle and crawl or fall into the sticky mixture, they’ll become trapped and eventually drown.
Any ants that manage to escape with a bite of the poisoned mixture will either perish or return to the colony and eliminate the other members. Whenever you use this option, you’re guaranteed to eliminate the ants in your kitchen one way or another!
You can similarly use this mixture in another form, especially if you’re having trouble convincing the ants to crawl into the bottle.
Apply your boric acid or borax mixture to a shallow dish or thin plate. Again, you can use any sweet substance that will attract ants, like syrup or jelly.
As ants notice your offering, they’ll flock to your trap like flies, consuming the tainted treat and returning to their ant mounds with the fatal delicacies. As the mixture spreads around the colony, it should eliminate most members!
If you’re interested in trapping the pests, fill a bowl with the sticky substance and leave it in your pantry or around your kitchen counters. If the ants are brave enough to dip their toes in the molasses or syrup, they’ll either become stuck or circulate the borax/boric acid around.
Before you try any new DIY hack, consider your needs and the scope of your infestation.
Traps work well for small-scale infestations or occasional invaders. For example, you typically utilize traps or spot treatments instead of wide-scale pesticides for spiders, certain fly species, or house centipedes.
Ant traps that contain baited attractants should entice the ants but may only partially eliminate the rest of the colony. Because an ant hill relies on the workers to forage for and return with food, more and more pests will come out of the woodwork to find their meal if the others fail.
Ant traps for kitchen areas are effective but often require other solutions like ant sprays or professional pest control to keep your home pest-free.
Are you still looking for a suitable alternative for you? Consider contacting us here at Zunex Pest Control! We can remove multiple ant species that may sneak into your home.
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