Black Garden Ants AKA The Common Black Garden Ant (Lasius niger)

These are an amazing insect, which as always makes the ant a fantastic pest. 

Ants as a species have been around for some 140 million years, and still going strong! It's said that ants can carry 50 times their own body weight! The Black Ant queen can live up to 15 years, and pretty much all her life is as an egg laying machine! 

Garden ants don't have ears. They communicate by using chemical scents called pheromones. This is a chink in their armour though, as when it comes to the pest  control of garden ants, we can use this against them! This is because we can mimic these chemicals and get them to go to our baits and gels, that the ants then take back to their queen, if we destroy the queen, we destroy the ant colony. They also use these pheromone trails to tell other ants where there is a good food source, you may of seen this in action when you see a trail of ants all following exactly the same path as one another. Again this is of advantage to the pest control of ants to the pest controller. We can find these trails and use the perfect residual insecticide on the trail, so that the worker ants inadvertently take back the insecticide back to the queen. Sometimes we will use an Insect Growth Regulator in the same manner, once the worker ant takes this back to the Black Ant Queen her eggs will not function properly and the ant colony will die out.

Ants as an insect are very numerous, in fact ants as a species account for 1/4 of total animal biomass in some areas of the world! There's around 7 billion humans on the planet, this seems to pale into insignificance when compared to an estimated 10 quadrillion ants, yes thats QUADRILLION!!! Hopefully not all of them will take up residence under your kitchen units or in your lawn, because that would be quite a colony ; )

Black garden ants can inadvertently carry diseases such as salmonella, this is because they will eat pretty much anything that takes their fancy, this includes household waste and even dog excrement!

WHAT CAN WE DO?

So, as amazing an animal that it is, what can us pest control experts do to rid you of ants?

Firstly let's presume that its common black garden ants that are infesting your house or lawn (there are numerous other pest species of ants, including Pharaoh Ants, Carpenter Ants, Wood Ants, Ghost Ant, and the more common Red Ant, all of these have very different treatments, so you'll need to give us a call about these). 

We tend to use a Residual Insecticide for black ants, this is an extremely effective treatment when applied correctly, we have treated thousands of ant infestations over the years and I can't actually remember a failed treatment!  

Sometimes we will use ant baits when the ant trails are hard to find or to access, but yet again this is a very successful method of ant pest control when applied correctly.

Get in touch with our team today here at Pest Interceptors, Pest Control Midlands. We provide the highest standard pest control services across the West Midlands. If you’ve got a pest control problem, give us a call. Whether it be Rats, Mice, Bed Bugs, Wasp Nest or any Pest Infestation we can come to your homes and businesses today!