Pest Invasion
Introduction
Pest invasion sounds a little dramatic. But the truth is, if your house is attacked by them you would simply not mind exaggerating it. The various domestic pests can include ants, cockroaches, fleas, ticks, spiders, and generally most insects and bugs. They can be annoying once in your house and can at times even be hazardous. And you need to have the know how to get rid of them effectively. While in my opinion, cockroaches are the most common and most annoying, we shall look at ants in this article as I have been noticing a new ants in my house recently.
Ants as pests:
- Modern society considers the ant a pest, and due to the adaptive nature of ant colonies, eliminating them is nearly impossible.
- Pest control with regard to ants is more a matter of controlling local populations than eliminating an entire colony.
- Attempts to control ant populations of any kind are temporary solutions.
Image Courtesy : svmomblog.typepad.com
I don’t know the species of the ant that I find in my house. They are these red and black ones which give a nasty bite. I think they are the Red fire ants.
Why do ants enter your house?
1) Kitchen:
This is probably the most common source. Everyone needs food and if you are careless with the way you store food, then you could have ants doing rounds in you kitchen.
2) Garbage bins:
If you throw edibles in your garbage and waste from the kitchen, then chances are ants will be attracted towards that. If you leave the garbage to stay there for longer, the decomposition will generate more odor and you will find ants on a holiday trip from far far away, into your garbage.
3) Wardrobes, closets, holes, gaps, switchboards …etc:
I think one of the reason ant infest the insides of your house is that it offers protection from the heat, the rain ….etc. I see ants in my house all around the switchboards(there is a hole in the wall where the switchboard is mounted), having colonies near them. In lamp fitments in the wall, because there is a small niche there. The gaps maybe small but enough for ants to have a small colony. Believe me once they start storing food from outside inside you house, that’s the most irritating part.
4) Elsewhere:
I have been noticing ants in my house gathering the powder from the Rangoli (Kolam, Kola podi) outside my house which they then store it elsewhere. I learnt from my mother that the ‘kola podi’ or the powder that they use to draw the Rangoli is edible rice flour or some other variant like that.
Pest Control of ants:
- Control of species populations are usually done with bait insecticides, which are either in the form of small granules, or as a sticky liquid that is gathered by the ants as food and then brought back to the nest where the poison is inadvertently spread to other members of the brood — a system that can severely reduce the numbers in a colony if used.
- Boric acid and borax are often used as insecticides that are relatively safe for humans.(Boric powder is available for use with carrom boards both in sports shops and medical stores.)
- With the recent insurgence of the red imported fire ant, a tactic called broadcast baiting has been employed, by which the substance (usually a granule bait designed specifically for fire ants) is spread across a large area, such as a lawn, in order to control populations.
- Nests may be destroyed by tracing the ants’ trails back to the nest, then pouring boiling water into it to kill the queen.
Practical approach to getting rid of ants:
All sounds well, except I don’t know how to get these granules and mix them with the insecticides and place them strategically so that ants will actually eat them. I can’t strew powder or bait around in my house or inside my wardrobe now, can I?
Here are some of my personal suggestions to kill ants inside your house:
- I think as long as ants are present on any article which is not your clothes, edibles, cutlery or books, you can possibly spray the place with a poisonous insecticide like the ones available in canisters. I used to do this if I found ants on the floor. The trouble with this method is that unless you find a whole bunch of ants or their nests, you are wasting both spray and time. You can’t hunt each ant down. If you find one or two squish it with your fingers if you aren’t uncomfortable with it(or a PETA activist) and if your religion permits it.
- Clothes: As I told you, my experience with ants in my wardrobe was a fairly recent one and here’s what I did. Firstly I removed all the clothes out of the wardrobe and checked for more ants. There weren’t many and I hope there aren’t. Then I put the clothes inside a bucket, turned my geyser right up to hottest and soaked all my clothes in hot steamy water. Either the ants drowned or they didn’t like the heat. The point is they died!!
- Books: With books, I think it’s fairly easy. Just throw them around a couple of times and put them out in bright sunlight. Anyway I haven’t seen those many ants in books and at least they won’t sting you in the wrong places unlike clothes.
- Cutlery: With cutlery it’s the same as clothes, soak in boiling water.
- Food articles: Well I don’t really know what you do when you find ants inside jam jars and honey bottles. If it’s invaluable you could throw it I guess. If it’s just happens to be some dry food like sugar, then putting it in hot sunlight should work
Article renamed. Original = “Pest Infestation/Invasion”
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How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth……
There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth – we have named only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest species – already over 50% of these thousand pests are already resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS. We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals every year due to “man’s footprint”. But, after poisoning the entire world and contaminating every living thing for over 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide POISONS we have not even controlled much less eliminated even one pest species and every year we use/misuse more and more pesticide POISONS to try to “keep up”! Even with all of this expensive and unnecessary pollution – we lose more and more crops and lives to these thousand pests every year.
We are losing the war against these thousand pests mainly because we insist on using only synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers There has been a severe “knowledge drought” – a worldwide decline in agricultural R&D, especially in production research and safe, more effective pest control since the advent of synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers. Today we are like lemmings running to the sea insisting that is the “right way”. The greatest challenge facing humanity this century is the necessity for us to double our global food production with less land, less water, less nutrients, less science, frequent droughts, more and more contamination and ever-increasing pest damage.
National Poison Prevention Week, March 18-24,2007 was created to highlight the dangers of poisoning and how to prevent it. One study shows that about 70,000 children in the USA were involved in common household pesticide-related (acute) poisonings or exposures in 2004. At least two peer-reviewed studies have described associations between autism rates and pesticides (D’Amelio et al 2005; Roberts EM et al 2007 in EHP). It is estimated that 300,000 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year just in the United States – No one is checking chronic contamination.
In order to try to help “stem the tide”, I have just finished re-writing my IPM encyclopedia entitled: THE BEST CONTROL II, that contains over 2,800 safe and far more effective alternatives to pesticide POISONS. This latest copyrighted work is about 1,800 pages in length and is now being updated at my new website at http://www.stephentvedten.com/ .
This new website at http://www.stephentvedten.com/ has been basically updated; all we have left to update is Chapter 39 and to renumber the pages. All of these copyrighted items are free for you to read and/or download. There is simply no need to POISON yourself or your family or to have any pest problems.
Stephen L. Tvedten
2530 Hayes Street
Marne, Michigan 49435
1-616-677-1261
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” –Victor Hugo
Hello Steve
Thank you for that environment friendly tip. It looks like you are an expert on pest control. Your site is very impressive.
Thanks for visiting our portal.
We have found Laxmanrekha, very effective in getting rid of ants.
@Stephen
Thanks for your comments. I am sure the readers will benefit from your research and think twice before using insecticides. If you read the article completely, which I am sure you did, Most of the suggestions were either using Boiling/Hot water, Kitchen ingredients and canisters. Of the above only canisters can qualify synthetic chemicals. I dont know exactly the composition of the canisters available in Indian market.
Maybe even the canisters can be avoided. Thanks once again for the comments. Now we need not look any further for pest management tips.
@Ottayan
Oh yeah. I should have thought of that too. But i played around with Laxmanrekha for cockroaches and it didnt work all that well. The HIT sprays work much better.
[...] article is from one the comments which talked about “Rat” problem. We have spoken about Pest Invasion in November last year. Here we wrote mainly about “ants”. The article today however is [...]
[...] Pest Invasion [...]
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