Ants showing their antennae after enjoying mild winter
A mild winter is leading to an ideal spring if you’re an ant.
Steve Taylor with Target Pest Control said the many varieties of ants in the province are on the move and his business is already getting calls to deal with the little home invaders.
ey’re also already getting inquiries about re ants, the more belligerent bugs known for their painful stings.
“We’ve already got calls, which is unheard of this time of year,” Taylor said. “Because the fire ants are getting a real good hold. ey’re spreading now … Sackville, Hammonds Plains, a lot in Halifax, but we’re nding they’re going in areas now where we wouldn’t expect to get calls. As the years go on, typically they would migrate better and better.”
Andrew Hebda, curator of zoology with the Nova Scotia Museum, said the European re ants, an invasive species that established a presence in the Halifax area around the 1950s, is strictly an outdoor variety. If you nd one inside your home, it likely hitched a ride in somehow.
ey are now also in the Lunenburg area as well as the Valley, he said. It seems that as well as spreading by moving into areas near existing colonies, they also have been spread by being carried in the root balls of plants when
people unknowingly shared them.
“They have multiple queens in their colonies and twice a year — and we’re just getting into that time now, which is May — a number of those queens will move with a number of the workers. ey may only move several metres away but they essentially set up a satellite colony.”
You can get rid of them, though it is di cult, he said. If you eliminate the queens, then the colonies fall apart. You have to take care of all the colonies in the area all at once, so you will have to co-ordinate with any neighbours who are also a ected.
Taylor said the typical way to handle re ants is to insert a “prod” into the nest and inject insecticide in a targeted area.
“You don’t want to spray the yard,” he said. “You don’t want to spray the whole property. You don’t want to do anything like that. You just want to treat where the ants are.”
As for the more typical ants that people may see in their homes, they’re usually harmless except for the carpenter ants, which can bore holes in the wood of your home.
“It’s actually been a very good winter for them so we should be expecting to see lots of activity, especially right now,” Hebda said. “So we’ve actually had a really, really, very, very nice, enjoyable — from the ant’s point of view — spring so far, so we should be seeing activity there.”
Usually around May most of the species will tend to reproduce, he said. So you may see some ants with wings on them. Most of them will be males. Queens will be quite a bit larger than the more numerous males.
Carpenter ants go where there’s moisture, so if you have them in your house it indicates moisture issues. Eliminating the ants from the house alone would not be enough if the conditions that brought them there persist.
“ ey’re a natural portion of the decomposition process in the woods, so they basically take trees that have died or what people call standing or coarse woody debris and they open it up,” Hebda said. “ ey’re treating our house as a tree.”
Taylor said sawdust shavings down around a window frame, heater, or trim around the home are an indication that you have carpenter ants, although sometimes it’s behind insulation and you never see it.
“Carpenter ants are usually a serious problem which needs proper treatment,” he said.
Other typical house ants are just looking for food. Homeowners are advised not to leave food out and look to disrupt the scent trails they leave for other ants to follow. Soap and water should work.