Asked April 23, 2021, 2:45 PM EDT
About two or three years ago my mother started getting ants in her basement — something that has turned into an annual affair. She's lived in the house since 1965 (in fact she and my father had the house built). She has had ants once in awhile. They usually are those tiny little ants and they have shown up on her kitchen counter around the sink. Occasionally she's had them in the basement too. Again, they've been those tiny black ants. Generally, if any food source was removed, and we sprayed they area, the ants disappeared. So roughly two to three years ago, she got an infestation of these larger flying ants. They arrive in the spring and tend to be centered around the utility room and a bathroom in the back corner of the basement. This area is in the northwest corner of the basement against the outer northern basement wall and the west wall that divides the finished portion of the basement with a dirt-floored unfinished portion of the basement lying under the west half of the house. The ants show up when I turn on light in the utility room—they fly around it. They also show up mostly in the bathroom and hang around the white sink directly under the overhead light. Usually they'll show up in the morning after I turn the light on. I've, at times, found 15 to 30 of these larger flying ants in and around the sink. They're never in the tub or around the toilet. Also, I've noticed that when I sit at a desk against the south wall of the basement, working at a computer, I'll hear this little flicking noise. I turn around and see the flying ants on the floor flipping around on white papers and envelopes I have laying on the floor. They seem to migrate from the back basement out to the paper directly under the ceiling can light.
This year, there has been an greater infestation in the basement of the tiny ants. I did find a shrunk-wrapped summer sausage that had been left on the floor that had been stepped on, tearing open the sealed wrapper. The sausage was hidden from view under a box. When I found it, it was covered by the little ants. Of course I threw it out and most of the tiny ants left. Then, about four days ago, I moved a "shoe box" that was sitting on the bathroom floor, against the west wall, and found probably 50 to 100 little ants scurrying around under it. It was full of toiletries, etc, not anything edible. The box also had a white plastic grocery bag in it. For the life of me, it looked like the ants had been chewing out holes in the white plastic bag. I got rid of the box and washed the floor and they seem to have left. However, the basement is still occupied by an indeterminate number of the small ants. The weirdest thing, and something that has never happed before, is that they are now found in a finished, carpeted basement bedroom in the northeast corner of the basement. And, here's the strangest thing: I've been sleeping in this room for several weeks and every morning I find one to three ants on my body. Really. And, they are definitely biting me at night. My body is covered by new bites every day and I find ants (one to three) crawling over my arms legs, etc. when I wake up. I've never heard of ants doing that before. I wondered if there could be bed bugs too but I have absolutely no idea where they would have come from as no one's been traveling during Covid. I'm sure it's the ants. So, right now the flying ants are emerging simultaneously while the tiny ants are in residence.
A couple of years ago, I considered hiring a pest control person. Instead though I went to Ace Hardware and bought some ant "foggers." They seem be mostly very effective — though the ants returned in smaller numbers later on. I also just bought four types of ant traps from Home Depot and am going to deploy them. I tried one of the "liquid" ant traps I bought—however it didn't really work. I also have a bag of granular ant poison that I used outside once a few years ago. I have access to the unfinished crawlspace under the house. My plan is to place the traps around the basement and possibly get some chemical foggers again. I could also pour some of the granular poison around the crawl space and around the corners of the unfinished utility room.
In summary, we're talking, for the most part a few ants at a time. Like this morning, I killed about four of them in the back-basement utility room and another three or four I stepped on that were on the floor. These were the flying ants. I also found one or two of the tiny ants in my bed this morning.
A few more final thoughts. When the flying ants showed up a few years ago I was worried they were termites. I collected some lives ones that I took when I went to Ace Hardware to get the foggers. Unlike people at Home Depot and some garden centers, this one guy at Ace seem to know his stuff. He said they were definitely ants and that they were, if I remember correctly, baby ants with wings ... something like that. Also, the yard doesn't seem to have an inordinate amount of ants. Though, in recent years, one or two larger (maybe a foot-and-a-half or two feet in diameter) ant piles have shown up in the lawn about 15 to 20 feet from the west side of the house. The foundation, BTW, is poured concrete and the house is brick and wood. The yard and basement are dry. Though with heavy rain there can be some water in the basement—though not much and not very often. The last time any water seeped into the basement was after the big rains and floods of 2013. This is all due to bentonite expansion that has cracked the floor, which is typical for this area of Jefferson County. Mostly it is a very dry basement.
Your thoughts?
Brian (aka Gettin' Antsy In Lakewood)
Jefferson County Colorado
