How to combat ants when they come indoors

With soggy soil and cold weather come unwanted home invaders – ants.

Can you blame them? They’re looking for somewhere warm and dry. They’re also searching for food; those scout ants have literally thousands of mouths to feed back in their colonies.

Since our recent storm waterlogged the path outside our kitchen, I’ve been fighting these clever little devils in their attempts to relocate indoors. First, a few showed up near the back door. Then, a couple crawled across the counter. More wandered around my spice cabinet. All were dispatched quickly with a soapy sponge.

The real trouble came overnight. They apparently crawled down the stove vent inside a pantry cabinet and discovered a bonanza – an unsealed box of crackers. When I opened the cabinet in the morning to get some cereal, I screamed. Ants seemed to be everywhere (although the cracker box was the only one that they had penetrated).

The battle is now truly on.

The advice from the University of California Integrated Pest Management program: Keep calm and grab some caulk.

Spraying pesticides inside the home will not prevent more ants from entering, says the UCIPM website. Instead, you need to figure out where they’re getting in and block those holes. It could be a small space around a door, a little crack under a window or a small gap around a pipe or vent. Follow the ants; they’ll eventually show you where.

“Focus efforts on keeping ants out of the house,” instructs the UC experts. “Follow good sanitation practices to make your home less attractive to ants.”

Close those would-be ant entries with caulk or other means. (Petroleum jelly can work as a temporary deterrent; they can’t stand sticky stuff.)

Remove what’s attracting the invaders to that area. Most ants go for sweets (cookies, candy, fruit or the classic ant nirvana, a sugar bowl). Others prefer cereals, crackers, pet food or other grain-based products. All ants seem to go for garbage.

Clean up any crumbs or sticky spills. Wipe surfaces with a soapy sponge or spray with window cleaner. That disrupts ant scent trails, the method ants use to communicate where to go.

Ant bait situated near those would-be entry points can help. (Ants carry the poison back to their nests.) But baits can take a week or more before they start taking effect. (The scouts have to find it, then introduce it to their nest.)

Ant control takes patience and persistence, sort of like the ants themselves.

To better tackle these itty-bitty intruders, get to know ants a little better. Not all ants are the same.

Argentine ants – which are dull brown and about 1/8-inch long – love sugar and oil. The most common invader, they make straight lines as they follow the leader to their quarry. Their colonies can number in the millions.

According to the UCIPM, Argentine ants “travel rapidly in distinctive trails along sidewalks, up sides of buildings, along branches of trees and shrubs, along baseboards, and under edges of carpets.”

My invaders were most likely Odorous house ants; they look similar to their Argentine cousins, except they’re darker – dark brown or shiny black – and they stink when crushed (hence the name). They also tend to wander around instead of traveling in straight lines.