Few things elicit the ire of homeowners more quickly than insect infestations inside a home. Though many types of insects can find their way into a home, ants tend to be especially skilled at such invasions, causing many a headache among homeowners hoping to send their uninvited houseguests packing once and for all.

Ants are attracted to food, water and shelter, making kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms ideal havens for these unwelcome critters to congregate. Such infestations can frustrate homeowners and make them uncomfortable in their own homes, but curtailing an ant infestation need not be so difficult.

* Identify the point of entry. Upon discovering an ant infestation, homeowners should conduct a thorough inspection of their homes to identify where the ants are entering the home. Ants are tiny and capable of crawling through the smallest of cracks or gaps, so every home is vulnerable to an ant infestation. Once you discover an ant inside your home, follow the ant rather than killing it, as foraging ants are typically sent from a colony located outside the home in search of moisture and food to bring back.

* Set the bait. Once you have identified the point of entry, you can then set some indoor ant bait. Employing borax, a natural mineral found in many common household products such as hand soaps and toothpastes, as their active ingredient, TERRO(R) Indoor Liquid Ant Baits use ants’ anatomy against them to curtail infestations. Adult worker ants cannot digest solid food, which they must bring back to the colony for additional processing.

Liquid ant baits exploit this physiology by making it easy for ants to transport the liquid bait back to the rest of the colony, where more ants will ultimately succumb to the bait. In addition, as the worker ant carries the bait back to the colony, it’s also dropping a pheromone trail from the bait to the nest, ensuring that other ants will know where to find the bait, which they will hungrily seek out, making it easy for homeowners to eradicate the entire colony of ants.

* Expect to see more ants after setting the bait. Baiting ants requires some patience on the part of homeowners, who should expect to see more ants appear in the hours after initially laying down the baits. That’s because the bait is intentionally attempting to draw ants out and attract as many of them as possible, so the more ants you see in the first couple of days after laying the bait, the more effective that bait will be at eradicating the colony. Especially large ant colonies may take up to 10 days to curtail, but smaller infestations can usually be controlled within 24 to 48 hours.

* Address the outdoors as well. Nearly all ant infestations can be traced to a colony beneath the ground outside a home. Though ants prefer to invade the interior of a home where they can find food, water and shelter, that does not mean your home’s exterior is immune to such infestations, which can typically be found by searching for foraging trails that look like a line of traffic filled with ants. That line often leads directly into a home via windows, doors, exhaust vents, faucets, sliding glass doors, and along gutters and exterior walls.

* Maintain an environment inside the home that’s uninviting to ants. Once baits have been set and ant colonies have been curtailed, homeowners can take steps to make their homes less inviting to ants in the future. Clean kitchens regularly, quickly cleaning up spills or crumbs, and use an exhaust fan in bathrooms and laundry rooms to cut down on the type of moisture that may prove attractive to thirsty ants. More information about indoor and outdoor ant bait products is available at www.terro.com.

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