Odorous ants removed from home in Neptune, NJ

In Neptune, NJ, a homeowner had an odorous house ant problem. Odorous ants, also known as stink ants, leave a pungent rancid butter smell when crushed. Another easy way to identify these ants is a strange behavioral trait: When alarmed, the worker ants will raise their abdomens in the air. These small ants often nest indoors in wall or floor voids, especially around heat sources. When any social insect infestation that has a queen-worker caste system with large populations that quickly grow including ants, termites, and many types of wasps and bees, killing isolated foraging worker insects will not completely eradicate the infestation. You must kill the entire colony including the almighty queen, the colony’s reproductive source.

When inspecting for an ant infestation, it is important to find the pheromone trail used by the foraging workers traveling back and forth from their nest. The trail will lead you to the source of the ant problem — the location of the nest. With this Neptune home, the nest was outside, and the ants were trailing inside the home via a low siding foundation area. 

To treat the infestation and destroy the colony, we applied both an interior treatment as well as an exterior treatment into the soil near the home’s foundation. These products are powerful non-repellent virtually odorless insecticides/termiticides with a long-lasting residual. Since ants, termites, and other insects can’t detect the product, they walk right through it, spreading it throughout the colony by killing every pest that they come into contact with. Soon the colony is destroyed. 

Any insecticide must applied  according to label instructions, especially when applied indoors. The product label must specify indoor use and the pest control technician is responsible for properly diluting the product based on label instructions. We also applied a crack and crevice treatment, carefully puffing small amounts of a dust directly into the cracks and crevices in order to reach any hiding pests. Ants and other insects pick up these small dust particles as they move along the tight spaces, and after absorbing the product through absorption or ingestion, it’s “game over.” This combination of applications indoors and outdoors is a sure-fire way to quickly resolve any ant infestation for homeowners.