Why are ants so hard to control if bait is so easy to spread and supposed to kill the entire nest?
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Ants are everywhere. If you wipe out one nest then the nests around that nest are just going to move into the previous nest’s territory. No matter what you do you’re just going to be dealing with new ants.
Ain’t ants half of land biomass?
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A few reasons:
1. Ant baits aren’t as effective as they claim. Yes, ants will carry the toxic bait back to the nest and, yes, it’ll do a number on the colony. But a mature ant colony is upwards of 100,000 ants – even up to half a million – and one ant bait station simply can’t do enough damage against those numbers. The only way a bait station is going to wipe out a colony is if the colony is very young (thus with far fewer ants in it) and the bait station is their sole or main source of food. Early in the season when ants emerge is the only time a bait station can realistically be expected to kill an entire colony.
2. Ants breed quickly, and even faster when it’s warm. A queen ant can lay 500-800 eggs *per day*, and while it takes a month or so (about 35-50 days depending on the species and temperature) for ants to go from egg to mature worker, they’re still adding hundreds every day. Unless you’re damaging the colony at a rate faster than that, at most you’re just holding their numbers steady.
3. There are other colonies. Even if you do wipe one out, more ants will move in, be they new queens flying in and finding a good site or an existing colony spreading out.
Marketing claims aside, while ants will “carry the bait back to the whole colony,” you’re basically trying to put out a bonfire by spitting at it.
More than likely you are not using the correct amount or not applying your ant control correctly.
Most bad ant problem are with multi queen species so you end up with multiple colonies in various locations around the home.
Bait works but works very slowly and most people just completely use it wrong or put it in the wrong areas. A bad problem will usually take a few trips even for a seasoned professional unless you happen to get very lucky and find the entire nest behind some insulation or in a door frame.
Ants might not be the smartest creatures but they have been around for a long time and simply know how to survive pretty well it seems.
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