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Hello, this is Ben with Ben’s pest control and it’s time for another episode of our Ben’s pest control podcast. And today we’re gonna do an episode on what we refer to in what is called the Pharaoh ant. Now the Pharaoh ant is something that a lot of people are not extremely familiar with. But they used to be extremely common in Florida. And the Pharaoh ant is an ant that is about two millimeters long. So it’s a very small and some people describe them as yellowish. I personally kind of saw them as like a tannish red, and they have a black thorax, which is there, but for those of you don’t know, they move very slowly, but they almost always walk in lines, and they are associated with food. Prior to the Ghost Dance in Florida. Back in the early 90s. Pharaoh ants were what most people call their sugar and they just get into sweets, they love sweets. However, unlike the Ghost Dance, which the ghosts sent absolutely just can’t seem to refuse sweets, Pharaoh ants do have a bit of a more varied diet. They also liked their proteins. So when it comes to Pharaoh, ants, you got to be prepared to attack them in a couple of different ways. The Pharaoh ants, like I said may have said they move very slowly, but they walk in a line, they’ll find a food source. And once they find the food source, usually they’ll will tell all their friends that there’s something that they really like. And they will ask their friends to kind of come and get it. And so what will happen is once they do find that food source, you’ll get this massive amount of ants that will come and start to eat. We had one not long ago here. And we had gotten a call and the lady is a baker she loves to bake. I believe she makes cakes and she was having a problem with the ants being in the cakes because they definitely liked the sweets. Now the distribution of the sand is actually they believe it was native of Africa. But it has been adapted very well to live in Florida. It has been found I believe in Europe. And in other continents it has done very well. The ant colony of the pharaoh ant consists of Queens males, workers, eggs, larva pupa. They usually like to nest near sources of food and water. But they normally they will prefer things like wall voids. So it can be very hard to discover where that nest is. And as a as an option for treatment, it’s very difficult to know where to treat because you don’t know where in the voids they are. As far as we know that they do not swarm. So they reproduce in their nests. So you don’t get that activity of flying ants that you do see with carpenter ants or fire ants, big headed ants. So that can sometimes make it a little bit more difficult to find them. But one of the things that’s very common is that this is another ant species that is very able to do what they refer to as budding, they can split their colonies. So they can, they can actually develop a queen from inside of part of a colony that maybe has been separated from the original colony. And if you don’t find the nest, or you may be tree part of the nest, then the other part of the nest survives, they’re able to then actually move part of the nest and one of their workers can actually become an egg laying queen. So it’s it’s very difficult to get them out of certain areas. And commercial buildings can be extremely tough. Another app that I always tell people that it is extremely important, if possible that you treat the the exterior of the structure you try to find where they’re coming from. So if you can put the food someplace, they will go out there and hopefully be drawn out of the structure so you can diminish the amount of ants that you have inside the structure. The Harappan store stories of electrical outlets or light switches that have been short circuited by these ants that have nested in them. There have been stories of houses that are so infested people just feel like they can’t even live with them anymore. The good news for us is, since the gold standards have come in, these are somewhat rare, but they are still around. We just had a case this week. So they are very possible. So if you’re not sure what kind of ants you have, if this helps you, great. If this doesn’t help you, or if you’d like to have us come out and take a look and you’re interested in one of our free 58 points, pest surveys and analysis, just give us a call at 772-878-1972 Thank you and I hope you have a great day.
