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Michael Stewart
Welcome again to another podcast from Ben’s Pest Control at BensPest.biz. I’m Mike Stewart, your host. We’re the premier pest expert podcast for residents of Port St. Lucie, Stewart, Florida, Fort Pierce, Florida and Palm City, Florida. And we have pest expert, Mr. Ben Sell on the call today. And we’re going to be talking about sugar ants, also known as ghost ants. You know, I know this is a problem for folks in the area. So Ben, tell us about the problem of sugar ants. And you know, what do they do? I know no one wants ants in their home. What do you guys know about this problem? What problems do they cause? And what do you guys do to fix the problem?
Ben Sell
Well, Mike, sugar ants, or ghost ants are the most common ant species that we deal with year round, it is just, I would almost describe it as the scourge of most homeowners. And it’s what we find that most people spend their money on as far as addressing this in their homes when they when they buy their own products at the store. What I tell people is this, a lot of people are not aware that sugar ants go stance actually are one of the few species that go through a process referred to as budding. And what budding is they can have multiple Queens in a nest. And when they spray their workers that they see on the kitchen counter or in the bathroom on the counter, and they take out that kind of bug spray, and they spray those workers down. What they actually end up doing is they kill the workers and they put down a residual spray that stops them for a period of time. But those multiple queens can actually as they go through that, that reaction to the chemical they bud so they can split up, let’s say there’s four Queens in a nest, they can split up creating for nest, eventually, with 16 queens. So you’re actually multiplying the problem in your home without even knowing that you’ve actually multiplied the problem. So in a lot of cases, what we find is, we got a lot of homeowners who call us up and they say to me, oh, you know, we had them in the kitchen, and we sprayed and next thing, you know, like a few weeks later, we had them in the kitchen, we had them in this bathroom, and we spray it again. And they seem to go away for a little while and, and now all sudden, we have them in three or four different rooms. And before they knew what they were in every room in the house because they just kept getting worse and worse. And what happened is that people just don’t realize that they’re actually making that situation worse by pulling out that kind of insecticide. Now, there’s a lot of people who realize and a lot of people who have been told you know, go buy Taro, it’s a great liquid and bait and, and Taro is a great product for the sugar. And so it really can’t help. But what they don’t know is that the taro being a food base bait, it actually goes bad. So when people buy Taro, the next thing we see is people will call some say, Hey, I bought the taro and it worked great at first now I’ll say it’s not working anymore. And we get out there and we look at their bottle of Taro and their bottle of Taro went from clear to yellow or to brown. And that’s because the bait spoiled. Once you open up that container and oxygen gets in like any food, it starts to go through the spoiling process and the actually spoiled while it was sitting there waiting for you to use it. And you’re not getting the same reaction, the ants eating it up as the way they used to eat it. And you’re not getting control those ants anymore because the product that you was working at first is not good anymore. So that’s another common thing that we see. And what I tell people is this, they just will overtake a house, they will be in your sink. There’ll be in your dishwasher. We’ve seen them in toilets, we’ve seen them in washing machines, any place there’s water, and a place there’s food. People will set stuff down and they’ll be all over it. One of my favorite stories of Ghost Dance was I used to work with this gentleman, he was retired police officer and he used to joke around all the time that he was the reason that police officers and donut jokes were created. Well, he was one of the nicest people I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with. Well, one day he called me up and he said, Ben, I’ve got these ants. He had gone out on a Friday night, bought himself a six pack of doughnuts, brought them home, set them on his kitchen counter. When he woke up on Saturday morning, he went to grab his doughnuts and his cup of coffee and he went in front of his TV and he sat down to watch the news. And he was eating his doughnut only to realize he was eating the ants that were all over the doughnuts that had gotten there throughout the night because they had found something sweet. And they attacked it. And it was absolutely crazy. He was like Ben, I was so flabbergasted that I was sitting here eating ants and I have no idea. But that shows you how drawn they are to sweets. I mean the doughnuts were just like the greatest thing ever for them. So one of the things I tell people that we do a lot of times very differently is we take a very good look at the house.
Ben Sell
We try to inspect the outside we look for plants, plants can have aphids. aphids are a food source for the ants that bring the ants to the house, we try to make sure that that situation gets addressed appropriately, we look at any spot where the answer coming in and we like to bait the ants on the outside of the house. That is one of the best piece of advice that I give homeowners, anytime is if they’re going to address these themselves, you really want to find where they’re coming from outside and you want to put that Taro outside because they’re going to be drawn to it. And when you put that Taro out, all those ants now are going out of the house to get their food instead of coming into your house to get food. So you get this result of less ants within just a few hours instead of days. Because now the food that they’re looking for, is away from where you’re having the problem. So we specifically try to make sure we do a very thorough inspection on the outside, find the sources, address those sources, and stop them at their source and treat them appropriately. And then we follow up on a regular basis to make sure that the answer under control and gone before we go ahead and spray the house to try to create a barrier to prevent them from coming back.
Michael Stewart
Well, it sounds like to me that, you know, there are some things you can do yourself, but there’s some times you just need to call a professional, you know, to have the right materials to have the right chemicals to you know, to treat the problem at the source. You know, when when you just take a grocery store insecticide. You know, you’re just putting a band aid on the problem. And it can come back with like you said, I had never heard that, you know, you can when you do that it can one colony can turn into four colonies. So in other words, if you have this, these homes for ants outside your home and you just do things to increase that, you know, they’ve got you outnumbered so that’s why you need to call Ben sell at bands past to take care of your sugar and, and go stamp problems. And you know we do this, like I said as a customer service for the folks in Port St. Lucie Stewart, Fort Pierce in Palm city to let you know what kind of pest problems they are. Give you some little insight of how bad those problems are. But more importantly, what to do when you have those problems. There’s some things you can do yourself. But there’s a lot of thoughts of times you need to hire a professional like band sell at bands pest control, and you can call him band, What’s your phone number?
Ben Sell
Well, Mike, I was just going to finish with this. If there is anybody who has any questions, they can call me at 772-878-1972 or they can go to our website BensPest dot biz. And they can contact us that way and we’ll be happy to answer any questions they have.
Michael Stewart
Absolutely. Share this podcast with your friends and family that listen to podcasts. You’ll learn a whole lot about what kind of bug and pest problems there are in your in this area. And then more importantly can subscribe to us on Apple, Spotify, Google and now, amazon music and until next time, I’m Mike Stewart for the Bens Pest Control podcast.
