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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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.
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