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Ant control
Where the Nest Actually Is
Twenty minutes and a bit of patience will usually find it, and finding it is most of the job.
It is outside
Start from the right assumption. A black garden ant colony nests in soil, outdoors, and what comes into a building is a foraging party. The nest is typically within a few metres of the wall, because the round trip has to be worth making.
People search kitchen cupboards for a nest and find nothing, which is correct, because there is nothing there to find. The ants in the cupboard are visitors.
The exception is pharaoh ants, which genuinely do nest indoors in warm voids. They are tiny and pale instead of black, and there is an article about them.
Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.
Follow the line
The method is simple and it works.
Find the trail indoors and follow it backwards, not forwards. Not towards the food, but away from it, towards where they came in. Ants run edges, so the line will hug a skirting, a worktop join, the frame of a door or the edge of a floor tile.
Find the point where it leaves the building: under a door, at a threshold, through a gap at the bottom of a unit, round a pipe. Then go outside and pick it up on the other side of that wall, and keep following.
Do it on a warm, dry afternoon, when traffic is heaviest. On a cold or wet day there may be nothing to follow at all.
What the nest looks like
Outdoors the signs are specific once you know them.
- Fine excavated soil pushed up through the joints between paving slabs, along the edge of a drive, at the base of a wall, or in a lawn. It is finer and looser than ordinary soil, because it has been carried out grain by grain.
- A small entrance hole at the centre of it, with traffic going in and out.
- Activity under something hard and warm: a loose slab, a doorstep, a decking board, a large stone, a shed base. Lift one on a warm day and you will know within seconds: workers start carrying the white brood down out of the light immediately.
- A line going into masonry at a joint, an airbrick, a weep hole or a crack in mortar, which means the nest is in or behind the wall structure and not in open ground.
More than one
On a long-running problem, expect more than one colony. A patio that has had ants for several summers commonly has two or three, and treating the obvious one leaves the others to carry on.
That is the usual explanation when someone says the treatment worked for a fortnight. It did work, on the nest it reached.
So when you have found one, keep looking. And when you ring us, tell us how many places soil is coming up: it is one of the more useful things you can say.
Before you book
Ant Questions, Briefly
I cannot find any trail outside. What then?
Try again on a warm, dry afternoon - traffic is far heavier and the line is much easier to see. If there is genuinely nothing outside and the ants are tiny and pale, that points at pharaoh ants nesting inside, which is a different job.
Can a nest be in a wall cavity?
Yes, particularly where a trail goes into masonry at a joint or an airbrick rather than into the ground. It is less common than a soil nest and it is worth knowing about, because it changes where treatment goes.
Tell Us Where the Trail Goes
Which room the trail is in, where it goes when it leaves the building, and whether soil is coming up between paving outside.
Get in touch
Book an Ant Treatment
Tell us which room the trail is in, where it goes when it leaves the building, and whether you have found excavated soil outside. A photograph of the trail is worth more than any description.
- Phone
- 01908 465226
- Message us on WhatsApp
- sales@miltonkeynespestcontroller.co.uk
- Milton Keynes Pest Controller Service
- Address
- South Row
Milton Keynes
MK9 3DQ - Covering
- Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and parts of Hertfordshire