How To Keep Ants Away

Once you have been able to get rid of ants in your home or business, you can work to prevent a reinfestation. By keeping the outside of your home undesirable to ants, you can help prevent new ant colonies from moving in.

Click on one of the methods below to learn about it, or continue reading to learn how to prevent ants both ways.

• Outdoor Sanitation
• Create a Barrier With Insecticide Spray

Pests of all kinds require three essential needs to exist on your property:

1. Food source
2. Water or moisture
3. Harborage or a place to live

By removing or limiting the pests food, water or harborage you will help make your property less attractive to pests. Making sure you maintain good sanitation will help limit most pests from moving in. Sanitation in ant control means altering or eliminating the things pests need to live.

Sanitation:

• Trim back trees and shrubs so that the branches and foliage do not touch your home so as to prevent ants from using them in avoiding pesticide applications
• Trim up bushes and shrubs so that you can see beneath them to eliminate moist shady areas where ants like to nest
• Rake back mulch, pine straw or other landscape bedding at least 6 inches from structure to create a "dry zone" that ants are likely to avoid
• Turn mulch or other bedding material every couple of weeks to keep moisture retention low and discourage nest building
• Clean out gutters and downspouts frequently as insects and other pests are known to harbor in these areas
• Mow your lawn as needed to keep growth low
• Remove grass clippings, leaf piles and stacked wood to eliminate harborages
• Remove ripe fruit from trees and off of the ground around trees
• Store outdoor trash cans and dumpsters as far away from structure as possible and be sure they have tight fitting lids
• Thoroughly wash out trash cans and dumpsters with an ammonia solution when needed

After you have completed the needed sanitation steps you can spray every 30-90 days around the perimeter of your structure with a general concentrated insecticide. This type of spraying is generally thought of as quarterly pest control and will help keep ants and most other insects out of your home. For more information on general pest control prevention applications please see our general pest prevention page.