WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO PREVENT ANTS FROM ENTERING YOUR HOME?
Pest prevention may not be the first thing on your mind when you think of home maintenance. However, preventing pests is important to your family’s well-being. In Colorado, ants are the most common pests. Avoiding an ant infestation is important for many reasons. Below, Bee Smart Pest Control has an answer to the question: Why is it important to prevent ants from entering your home?
Food Theft and Contamination
One of the biggest things ants will do is try and devour as much of your food as possible. Ants will find every last crumb and take it back to their colony. Ants specialize in finding large stores of food. Then they’ll swarm with as many ants as possible to bring it all back home. What they can’t carry back with them, is left contaminated and not safe for human consumption. This contamination creates an even bigger problem because ants have been known to carry food-borne disease organisms with them. They can carry E. coli, Streptococcus, Shigella, Salmonella, and Staphylococcus.
Property Damage
Ants will cause damage to your home, outside of your food supply. One of the most common ant species in Colorado, the Carpenter Ant, can even chew through wood! Carpenter Ants, aka Camponotus pennsylvanicus, nest in dry or moist wood. They remove wood to create passageways known as “galleries”. The removal of this wood creates little piles of sawdust, a sign you may have an ant problem. A Carpenter Ant’s gallery may go unnoticed, leading to severe structural damage to your home. They also typically make multiple nests in a home, so finding one Carpenter Ant colony may just be the beginning of your ant problem.
Do-It-Yourself Solutions Don’t Always Work
If you have an infestation it may seem like a good idea to solve it yourself. However, this isn’t the case for a multitude of reasons. Pesticides are a typical solution to infestations. Although just killing the bugs is the goal, most pesticides only manage to kill visible ants. Without killing the colony, or colonies, it doesn’t matter how many ants you kill. Some pesticides only work well for some species of ants. Some ants need spot shots, some need bait, but most need specific and specialized treatments to fully eradicate the problem. On top of all that, many pesticides are harmful to more than just the pest you’re looking to kill. They can harm your family and pets if you aren’t careful. Since some ants have multiple colonies, it can be difficult to find all of the colonies around your home. And if a single colony survives, the infestation will continue.
Home and business owners alike benefit from a professional pest control provider. Bee Smart Pest Control specializes in keeping pests out in the first place. We use only insecticides that are safe for your children and pets once the treatment area becomes dry. Most importantly, our pest control solutions are designed to get to the root of your problem and make your property a less likely home for pests.
If you do have an infestation, you need to call an exterminator. A professional pest control technician will create a specialized plan for your unique situation so you’ll be sure to have the pests eradicated as efficiently as possible. While an infestation may be stressful, Bee Smart Pest Control will help you get a personalized solution. We pride ourselves on our safety and ability to relate to a customer on a personal level. Contact Bee Smart Pest Control online, or call us at 720-937-0527, to get a solution for your exact pest control problem today!