"ACES | ants pest control Auckland, is aware that this ant has been found in New Zealand, but is generally uncommon. Careful management of this species is required otherwise you can trigger their "budding" mechanisims where queens leave the nest with workers and set up mutliple remote nest sites. This makes the problem much worse. If you see the "golden" Pharaoh ant best to call the Professionals straight away!"
As its name suggests, the pharaoh ant views itself as a ruler among ants, a real headache for home and business owners.
As its name suggests, the pharaoh ant certainly views itself as a ruler among ants and they can be a real headache for home and business owners, and the pest management professionals that are tasked with eliminating them.
Unlike other ant species that are easily traced by following visible trails, pharaoh ants do not necessarily follow specific trails when they forage for food and harborage. Combine that with their preference to establish nests in hard-to-reach locations like wall voids, subfloors and attics, and the pharaoh ant is a worthy adversary.
Pharaoh ants are a problem in both commercial and residential accounts. While primarily a nuisance in residential accounts, they can present a health threat in food processing and healthcare facilities, hotels and grocery stores because they can carry and leave behind harmful bacteria (i.e. Salmonella, E. coli) on surfaces they come in contact with.
Pharaoh ants are drawn to commercial facilities because of the warm, humid conditions and abundant food and water sources that are often found inside within commercial kitchens and laundries.
There have been numerous documented cases where pharaoh ants have posed a major threat in healthcare facilities hospitals, nursing homes and extended care facilities where they have entered patient wounds and IV bags seeking moisture.
Pharaoh ant colonies are large in size with multiple nests and when they are displaced sometimes the result of a pesticide application members will venture off and establish new colonies in a process called budding.
In residential homes, pharaoh ants typically nest near the kitchen including voids under cabinets, behind baseboards and under floors. They also use electrical, cable and telephone wiring as a highway system to travel through walls and between floorboards.
Considering the challenges pharaoh ants present, what are the best methods for combatting them?
John Judge, training specialist for Environmental Pest Services in Tampa, Fla., which manages operations in three different Southern states, says a proper inspection and strategic bait placements are key elements of a pharaoh ant management program. The pharaoh ant is not hard to identify but when it splits off during the budding process it can move rapidly and infest the other side of the structure from where you originally found it, says Judge. Because of its mobility a technician must look at the whole house rather than just his or her inspection in one area.
The proper use of inspection tools (i.e. flashlights, probing tools, etc.) and knowledge of construction practices (i.e. identifying connecting walls, location of electrical wiring, etc.) will also help the technician track the source of the infestation and how it got there.
Pharaoh ants found on the outside of the structure should be lured away by the strategic use of baits and repeated treatments may be required to completely eliminate this pesky invader.
Judge says the customer also plays an important part in preventing pharaoh ant by following good sanitation practices.
Keeping kitchens and food preparation areas clean of spilled food and removing excess moisture and clutter will make those areas less attractive to pharaoh ants, says Judge. As with most pest issues securing customer buy-in goes a long way.
A proactive approach to pharaoh ant management with customers understanding how basic maintenance tasks and adhering to good sanitation practices will help mitigate the problem.
adapted from PCT online http://www.pctonline.com/article/tracking-eliminating-pharaoh-ant/
ACES pest control using another technique when compared to this article. There are two ways of treating ants, repellent ( imagine a red STOP sign) which sets a barrier around the house. Effectively immediately as little ants are easy to kill. But always a temporary fix as it never gets to the Queen. This is the method described in this article. ACES uses the second method, NON repellent or TRANSFER ( imagine a Green GO sign). The technique is slow and not very impressive initially, but is very harmful the nest and Queen (s). ACES uses 100% transfer products. We hope you enjoy Emilys article.
GREENVILLE, N.C. What do you think of when a six legged, mighty, food scavenger comes to mind? Ants and lots of them.
You won’t notice them until they come home and they see hundreds of them on their countertops and their pantries and that kind of thing, said Peter Schonemann of Russ Pest Control. Then it’s a problem.
If you can get rid of them outside, then you won’ t have as many problems inside, Schonemann said.
Spending the past half hour trying to find an ant hill was difficult. It seemed the weather was just too hot.
If you get a lot of hot weather, it’s really dry they are looking for moisture, said Schonemann. And they end up sending out foragers looking for food. They find that crumb the kids left, or sugar you spilled when you made some coffee that kind of thing.
But there is one ant that is easier to spot than the others.
Fire ants are the most difficult ant to control, said Carl Little, Lowe’s garden employee. Although three species are common in our area argentine ants, odorous house ants, and fire ants fire ants are the worst.
Fire ants are one of the biggest problems we have in eastern North Carolina, said Little.
The best way to take care of them is, pre-treat the best thing to always do is pre-treat in the early spring or summer with something like a broad pesticide or broad product with something like a slower release than wait ‘til you have the problem.
And when taking care of that ant hill in your backyard on your own, go for the pesticide that targets the one that, kills the queen of the nest, and therefore eliminates the problem altogether.
adapted by ACES pest control from and aricle from By Emily Gibbs from http://wnct.com/2017/07/25/tips-to-keep-ants-out-of-your-home/
for more information on services offered by ACES pest control please click here for our services for rodents please click here for services for ants please click here and for cockroaches please click here
Finding new species may call to mind images of scientists tracking mysterious footprints in the mud or cutting paths through the dense jungle.
But sometimes, a discovery is as easy as getting a frog to open its mouth and say, “Ah.”
Such is the case for Lenomyrmex hoelldobleri, a new tropical ant species found in the belly of a diablito, or little devil frog (Oophaga sylvatica), in Ecuador.
The diablito, a kind of bright orange poison frog, is known for its love of ants, says Christian Rabeling, a myrmecologist at the University of Rochester, New York. The new ant species is named after Bert Hölldobler, a German evolutionary biologist and ant expert, for his 80th birthday.
Because ant-eating frogs go hunting for bugs in tiny and hard-to-access places, scientists use them as a tool to go where they can’t go. By capturing a wild frog and flushing their stomachs, the amphibians vomit whatever is in their bellies—revealing potential treasures, like the new ant.
“Sometimes people think that our world is very well explored. Nothing could be farther from the truth,” says Rabeling, who led a new study on the ant, published September 19 by the journal ZooKeys.
Mysterious Ant
Because the only known specimen of L. hoelldobleri is a dead one from a frog's stomach, scientists know almost nothing about it.
A glimpse through a high-powered stereomicroscope at that ill-fated ant, however, has offered a few clues. (See "Watch: Ants Use Giant Jaws to Catapult Out of Death Trap.")
“The shape of the mandibles reminds me of forceps,” says Rabeling. This may mean that the ant, which is less than a quarter of an inch long, uses its mouthparts to pry even smaller prey animals, such as termites, out of tight crevices. “But I am just speculating,” he admits.
If the scientists could find living L. hoelldobleri in the Ecuadoran rain forest, the team they could submit the little guys to a “cafeteria test," which means offering an animal multiple prey items to see what it prefers. (See "Surprising Ant 'Mixing Bowl' Found in Manhattan.")
“The difficulty is finding the ants!” says Rabeling.
The little devil frog, obviously, has figured out how to locate them—and for good reason.
Poison frogs get their namesake chemical defenses from alkaloids found in the ants and other critters they consume, says Jonathan Kolby, a National Geographic grantee and director of the Honduras Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Center.
"Physiologists regard ants as mini chemical factories," adds Rabeling. The insects likely use the chemicals as signals to communicate with other ants in their complex societies.
As for where the ants get their alkaloids, Kolby says some species may acquire it from the plants they eat. But what role, if any, L. hoelldobleri may play in the poison game is anyone’s guess.
Belly of the Beast
Because many amphibians are endangered—the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists O. sylvatica as near threatened—any research with wild frogs must be done carefully, and only by trained experts, Rabeling notes. (Read more about why amphibians are vanishing.)
To flush the stomach, scientists insert a soft tube into the amphibian’s mouth and gently fill it with water, prompting whatever the frog has eaten recently to flow out of its mouth and onto a tray. The frog can then be safely returned to its natural habitat.
This is not the first time a new species has been found inside another animal’s stomach, by the way. Kolby points to the example of Dunn’s earth snake (Geophis dunni), which was found in the stomach of a coral snake (Micrurus nigrocinctus) in Nicaragua in 1932.
Furthermore, it seems L. hoelldobleri had some company in the little devil frog’s stomach. The research project that first identified the new ant also found several other as-of-yet undescribed insects.
It seems the little devil’s frog's belly might be the gift that keeps on giving.
By Jason Bittel
Man lets a bullet ant sting him on purpose and you’ll absolutely believe what happens next
ACES pest control have had their fare share of wasps stings, but that is rated 1 on a scale of 30. The bullet ant is rated the worse sting in the world for pain- that's number 30. So we can tell you this guy is 100% BONKERS
"About two months ago, we witnessed outdoor adventurer Coyote Peterson let a wasp known as a tarantula hawk sting him on his arm. Boasting the second most painful sting in the insect world, the tarantula hawk quickly had Petereson writhing on the ground in pain. And of course, it was all captured in a harrowing and altogether fascinating video.
Earlier this week, Coyote Peterson was at it again during an episode of Breaking Trail, this time taking things a bit further and letting himself get stung by a bullet ant, the insect widely believed to have the most painful sting in the world. The bullet ant typically inhabits rainforests in Central America, so odds are you don’t have to worry about coming into contact with one them. But if you’re sporting a name like Coyote Peterson, well, you pretty much have no choice but to seek out the bullet ant yourself.
According to the Schmidt Pain Index, the bullet ant, if I may repurpose some old Wu-Tang Clan lyrics, ain’t nothing to mess with. The resulting pain from a bullet ant sting is said to be extremely intense and feels like you’re “walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.” Interestingly enough, the reason why this fearsome insect is called a ‘bullet ant’ is because its sting is said to be as painful as a gunshot.
And for reasons that defy explanation, our fearless hero Coyote Peterson thought it might be a fun idea to get stung by one of these creatures on purpose. Naturally, it was all recorded on video for our collective enjoyment/horror."
the video is next door in our you tube section ====> worth a look
for more information on services offered by ACES pest control please click here for our services for rodents please click here for services and for cockroaches please click here
adapted from an article by Yoni Heisler http://bgr.com/2016/12/23/bullet-ant-sting-pain-coyote-video/
6 things you didn't know about ants, and how to kill them Ants are marvelous creatures.
They're organized, brave, strategic – and you may have heard about how certain ants can lift up to 50 times their body weight.
But here's where ants aren't so marvelous: In your home.
Ants are among the most-common household pests in the world, parading through the kitchens, bathrooms and living spaces of city dwellers and suburbanites alike.
Of course, it's easy to dismiss their presence as a harmless nuisance, but when you find them in your loaf of bread, swimming at the bottom of your lemonade or worse, tangled in your hair, a line has to be drawn.
The good news? Ants are fairly easy to eradicate if you take the proper measures, and according to a 2015 Raid® consumer survey, the majority of Americans (82%) say that they aren't afraid to handle the problem themselves.
However, as with any pest, the more you know about them, the smarter you can be when it comes to getting rid of them.
Here's some “ant-astic” trivia that can aid you in your next bout with those crafty, six-legged interlopers.
1. Who run the world? Ants build sophisticated societies with a distinct and entrenched social order: The queen (or several queens, in some cases) is the colony's sole way to reproduce and most important member; the queen is guarded by a group of soldier ants, and the remaining population works to feed the colony.
Funny enough, most of the colony is female — soldiers and workers included. Male ants exist purely to mate, and then die shortly after.
Tip: Succession can be complicated. So when ridding your house of ants, your number one priority should be taking out the queen. Without reproductive resources, the colony will fold in no time.
2. Follow the leader When you see ants marching across your kitchen counter in a straight line, it isn't because they think it looks fancy. Rather, each ant in the line is following a pheromone trail left by the first ant to ever travel that route. Pheromones are chemical signals that ants lay down to attract and guide other ants to locations, such as food sources. The more ants that use the trail, the stronger the pheromone scent becomes.
Tip: Pheromone trails make it fairly easy to predict where ants will enter and exit your home. Monitor popular ant thoroughfares and strategically deploy baits along those routes.
3. Only the good die young You can have an ant infestation for a year and potentially never see the same ant twice. Ant colonies are built for longevity, and can survive as long as the queen continues to populate the community, but some worker ants, on the other hand, only have a life span of up to a month.
Tip: When controlling ant invasions in your home, it's important to focus on eliminating the source — not just the current wave making its way across your dinner table. Use baits to get active ingredients into the colony and kill ants where they hide.
4. Introducing the New York City of ant colonies Each species of ant has its own unique chemical profile — kind of like a fingerprint — that allows colony members to identify their own and weed out intruders. However, that chemical profile doesn’t always end with a single "hill." Some ants, like the Argentine ant, have found their way into every continent on Earth except Antarctica. Since this species has multiple queens, it can bud off to inhabit a new geographic location, allowing a single colony to stretch across continents to establish massive populations.
Tip: Even if your baits successfully eliminate one colony, there may be others on the way. Once you've gotten ants out of your home, it's important to protect its exterior, both by shoring-up cracks and entry points as well as spraying barrier sprays.
5. They aren't just after your food It's easy to get caught up in visions of ants escorting a full pot roast out your back door, but like most living things, ants are just as interested in your water as they are your food. Ants will both drink water they come across and transport some back to the colony to nourish the queen.
Tip: When ant-proofing your home, don’t just secure your food items — make sure the surfaces in your home, sinks included, are kept dry.
6. Creating a defense system is the best way to help control & kill ants A sophisticated problem requires a sophisticated solution. As discussed, simply killing the ants you see will only help you in the short term. The best defense you can mount includes a variety of resources, including baits and on-contact sprays.
by mashable Australia
How do I get rid of ants?
Although ants generally don’t cause harm to people — they don’t carry disease, like some other pests — an infestation can be a major nuisance.
“Ants can be extremely persistent creatures, seemingly coming from nowhere and can be difficult to entirely get rid of,” says Kelly Garvin of Greenix Pest Control in Dublin, Ohio.
Fortunately, DIY and professional pest removal options are available.
REASONS FOR ANT INFESTATION
Ants typically invade your home for one reason: food. Most feed on sugary or greasy items.
Sugar ants — also called odorous house ants — are one of the most common ant invaders and among the first pests to show up in the spring. They’re about one-eighth of an inch or smaller and are attracted to food sources.
The common pavement ant, which is brown to black and about 1/10th of an inch long, will set up colonies near driveways or patios and then send out scouts to search for food in your home. They eat meat, grease, seeds, dead or live insects, and can sting and bite if disturbed.
Argentine Ants — about 4 to 4.5 mm long ONE size. Usually come into your house for food. Loves protein and fat, often found in your dishwasher or pantry.
Coastal Brown Ants- two sizes. Dark brown, loves protein often found in dishwasher. Two sizes one has a BIG head.
Knowing what type of ant you’re dealing with can help you prevent or combat an infestation.
KEEPING ANTS OUT
The first step to prevent an ant infestation: clean house. If you see scout ants in your home, kill them immediately. Make sure you don’t leave any food out and keep all kitchen surfaces clean.
If you continue to see ants, make sure you’ve closed off possible entry points, including sealing small cracks in your walls or under windows. Start by caulking potential entry points, such as window casings.
Next, you can lay down barriers like salt or talc under doors to turn ants away, or apply scents such as vinegar, peppermint oil or cinnamon. Bear in mind, however, that anything you put down will also be of interest to pets and children, so be careful what you use.
DIY METHODS FOR ANT REMOVAL
If ant explorers have morphed into a full-on colony, then you need a plan.
Start with soap and water. This will not only kill chemical trails, but any ants it touches. Add citrus to the water to increase its effectiveness.
You can also purchase pest sprays and baited ant traps from local grocery and hardware stores. These use a mixture of sugars and ant poison, such as boric acid to attract, trap and kill ants. Proceed with caution when using poison.
Bear in mind, too, that these traps won’t work on protein-feeders like Coastal Brown or Argentine Ants, since the sweetness won’t interest them.
In addition to trapping ants inside, you can also spray around the exterior of the home where the house meets the pavement or ground to prevent more ants from infiltrating, says David Anderson of Eastside Exterminators in Woodinville, Wash.
Garvin recommends spraying problem areas with a mixture of Windex, vinegar and water. She says spreading Diatomaceous Earth in carpeted areas around the bathroom is a safe and natural way to kill ants because it’s a food source.
“The Windex or vinegar is really a quick fix and not really that effective, but it will remove the immediate ants and wipe away their pheromone scent they use to follow trails,” Garvin says.
Dan Miles, owner of Total Exterminating in Indianapolis, suggests spraying all cracks around the baseboards and the base of the toilet if the infestation is in the bathroom.
HIRE A PEST CONTROL PROFESSIONAL
Large-scale infestations require assistance from a pest control professional.
Pros address ant problems by locating the colony itself; typically this starts by laying bait traps, which contain poisoned food taken back to the nest. Once found, exterminators can use a variety of techniques including chemical sprays to totally eliminate the ants in your home.
Modified from Tom Moor Article
While ants can be pests in Auckland, they are still amazing little creatures! ACES pest control is sometimes surprised at how resourceful ants are. This article shows another way that ants are amazing!
Ants don't tend to get in traffic jams. They might butt heads (or antennae) momentarily as they go about their industrious business, but ants somehow have mastered the art of keeping things moving. They're geniuses of flow.
Another striking thing about ants is that some of them just sit around doing nothing. This has also been noticed in other social insects, such as bees. When ants build a nest, some of them just sit around, inert, lazy, seemingly useless.
Now a study out of Georgia Tech, published Thursday in the journal Science, combines these observations to deliver a lesson that could have implications for such things as how the robots of the future might be used for disaster relief. The researchers found that ants are more successful when they are selectively industrious. They use idleness to their advantage. Quitting has its virtues.
The researchers studied groups of 30 color-coded fire ants digging tunnels in glass-walled containers in a laboratory. About 30 percent of the ants did 70 percent of the work. Some ants did very little or nothing. When the researchers removed the most hard-working ants, some of the previously less-active ants stepped up their game and began working harder. It appears that industriousness is not an individual attribute but a defined role. It's like a job title: heavy lifter.
When excavating a tunnel during the frenzy of nest-building, the tunnel face the deep end of the tunnel can get crowded. That can cause traffic jams. What the researchers noted is that some ants turn around and leave the tunnel without doing any work. These reversals limit the potential for clogging up the works.
The team created computer models with simulated ants and found that this system of selective idleness enables the ants to dig deep faster. Their method reduces the chances of clogs. In effect, the ants have solved the eternal problem of too many cooks in the kitchen.
“What the ants have discovered is pretty close to the best way to do it. You need the idleness distribution and the appropriate amount of giving up, said Daniel Goldman, a Georgia Tech physicist who runs the lab and is the senior author of the new study.
“It’s a nice example of where doing less gives you more. And perhaps the most, said Ofer Feinerman, a physicist who studies ants at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and who was not involved in the new research. It seems the ants do the best that they could have done.
The Georgia Tech team built robots to try to simulate the ant behavior and couldn't quite match it, apparently because a robot is clunkier than a segmented, limber ant. But the robot work confirmed the basic idea that simple rules, such as knowing when to quit and let other individuals do the work, can benefit the overall project.
This kind of investigation could lead to improved designs for robot swarms. For example, multiple autonomous robots may need to enter buildings destroyed by earthquakes to look for survivors. Such efforts could benefit from simple strategies that involve labor inequality, the new paper states.
“If you wanted to have a system of diggers dig in a confined area, you don’t want to throw them all at the same tunnel. You want to have them selectively participate and not participate based on these physics-inspired rules, said Nick Gravish, a University of California at San Diego professor who studies ant biomechanics. Gravish earned his doctorate under Goldman at Georgia Tech but was not involved in the current study.
The principle of selective idleness could aid human teams working collectively on a document or a piece of computer code, said Simon Garnier, a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who studies collective behaviors in everything from slime mold to fish to mammals. "As long as all the agents in the system have a common collective goal, this principle might help them achieve it faster by reducing conflicts in accessing a common resource," Garnier said.
Fire ants are an invasive species common in the Deep South. They first arrived in the United States less than a century ago from the wetlands of South America.
They often live in low-lying, flood-prone areas. A fire ant colony functions like a superorganism. During a flood, the entire colony forms a raft, with the queen protected in the middle. This happened notably last year when Hurricane Harvey flooded the Southeast Texas coast.
The colony floats on the surface of the floodwater. When the ant-raft finally washes up somewhere, the ants build a nest rapidly. The workers (all female) can't leave the queen exposed.
No matter what kind of soil the ants dig in, they make their tunnels roughly the diameter of the length of an ant. That means their legs and antennae are always within reach of the tunnel wall, which assists the ants during moments of slippage. They can use their antennae as if they were auxiliary limbs.
Feinerman said researchers have noted that ants are sensitive to success and failure. When an individual ant tries to do something, such as obtain food or dig a tunnel, and is successful, she keeps doing it with extraordinary vigor and endurance. But when she fails, such as getting stymied while trying to enter a tunnel, she will quit and become inert. He said the new research suggests that relatively simple rules govern this behavior.
“There’s a positive feedback between how successful an ant is and her tendency to repeat the task, he said.
Gravish, who builds robots inspired by insects, said of ants: They’re far more complicated than robots. I wish we could get even close to the complexity of ants.
edited from Joel Achenbach original article https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/08/16/industrious-fire-ants-reveal-surprise-secret-to-success-selective-laziness/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c784206907dc