Pest Control in Manasquan, NJ
Recently, I went on a service call to a home in Manasquan, NJ for a homeowner who had an issue with ants in her bathroom. Bathrooms provide the perfect breeding ground for ants. Stagnate water and materials coating the inside of your bathroom drains like human hair, soap, and flaked-off skin attract many types of insects, especially ants. And once ants make their way into your bathroom, it can take a great deal of effort to remove them.
As soon as I began my inspection of the bathroom, I immediately noticed ants crawling up and down the floor to a window sill. I identified these ants as pavement ants, one of the more common nuisance ants. These ants received their clever name because the queen often forms her colony under sidewalks, building slabs, and large rocks, all of which provide a dark, moist, hidden area for these ants to build their nests. A common sign of pavement ant activity are sand piles. These mounds of small soil particles are deposited debris from their excavated nests.
Whenever dealing with an ant infestation, I trace the ant trail to determine how and where the insects are gaining access to the building. Here, the ants were using a tiny gap in the window sill to gain access into the bathroom. As I followed the ant trail, I noticed a thin layer of moisture on the bathroom floor. The foraging ants were taking water from the bathroom to their colony. Water is as much of an attractant for ants as food!
To resolve this infestation, I applied a liquid gel bait along all the baseboard, windowsill, cracks and cervices in the bathroom. The ants will carry this product back to the nest to share with the queen and the rest of the colony. With ant infestations, merely killing foraging ants is not enough. Foraging ants are readily replaceable, especially considering that ant colonies can easily number in the thousands. To successfully resolve an ant infestation, the queen and the rest of the colony members in the hidden nest must be eliminated, and our products do just that.
As an added measure, I treated the attached hallway, the exterior, and a nearby bedroom with a light liquid application. Even though we often cannot access the subterranean nest directly, we use the ants’ social behavior in a colony to reach the nest indirectly. In no time at all, this home will be ant-free!