Know your Enemy – Ant Facts
Are you having problems with ants? Is your home swarming with tiny six legged unwelcome guests? Are creepy little creatures marching into your house as if they own the place? If the answer is yes, then this site is just for you.
There are a few things you should know about ants before setting out on an ant-hunt.
Ants are actually an important part of our ecosystem and as such it wouldn’t be a good thing to wipe them out completely. Instead we need to ‘control’ ants so that they don’t infest our living areas, and become a pest.
Yes, it may be tempting to break out the flamethrower, and raze their little ant nests from the face of the earth, but really all that will do is leave a large hole in the eco-system, which could possibly be taken over in the evolutionary food chain by some kind of mutant giant cockroach. You don’t want that kind of problem so lets stay calm in the face of adversity.
Ants are social insects; they live in groups known as ‘colonies’. When I say social, I don’t mean they go down the pub for a few swift beers with their mates after a hard day of ransacking your pantry. No, their social lives are actually limited to a bit of antennae twiddling and the odd squirt of of communication smell juice.
In every colony of ants there are one or more Queen ants. These special types of ants are the reproductive members and are the only ants that lay eggs. The Queen does not actually wear any kind of crown as you might expect, and there are no Will and Kate style weddings in ant-land. They do not even wave from tiny royal balconies or such like.
The other two types of ants are the male ants (known as ‘drones’) and female worker ants. Female worker ants are sterile, do not reproduce and do all the work for the colony including searching for food. Human society is full of amazing equivalents to ant society, and you might find some of them on obscure dating sites.
Ant Colonies send out a ‘scout’ to locate food sources. The scout ant lays a trail of pheromone so that other ants can follow the trail and collect food. This is why we see the ants coming and going in a line, and not because they are doing the conga. Again humans are surprisingly similar in lifestyle to that of the ant; many of us spend time travelling in lines first thing in the morning and just before the onset of night to travel too and from the ant-hills in the city, although most of us do not lay eggs there (like the Queen does).
Ants, Its Time For You To Move Out!
Now we know how ants live and work we can use that knowledge to stop ants come into our homes, infesting our food, and generally being annoying.
Choose your approach and eradicate those pesky ants from your home once and for all!
