Professional Ant Control in Greenwich

Signs You May Need Ant Control in Greenwich

• A consistent trail. Ants following the same line along a worktop, a skirting or a wall, day after day, rather than wandering individuals.
• A trail that disappears into a gap. Under a doorstep, into a wall, behind a kickboard or down beside a pipe - that is the direction the nest is in.
• Small piles of fine soil. Between paving slabs, at the edge of a path or on a doorstep, pushed up as the nest is excavated.
• Ants concentrated on something sweet. Spillage, pet food, a bin or a fruit bowl, with a steady two-way stream to and from it.
• Flying ants on a warm day. A mature nest producing winged reproductives, usually over a short period in mid to late summer.
• Activity indoors in early spring. Which usually means the nest is in or against the building rather than out in the garden.

Why the Spray in the Cupboard Does Not Fix It

A household ant spray kills the workers it lands on. Workers are the disposable part of the colony - they are produced continuously, and the queen that produces them is not on the kitchen floor. Kill the trail on Monday and the colony sends more out by Wednesday, because nothing that mattered has changed.

There is a second problem with spraying, and it is worse than the first. Heavy chemical disturbance around a nest can cause it to fragment - the colony splits and relocates into several smaller nests in new places. One trail becomes three, in three parts of the building, and the job is now considerably harder than it was before anybody did anything.

Baiting works precisely because it is slow. The workers have to survive long enough to carry it home.

How Ant Treatment Works

The first job is to follow the trail rather than treat it. Where does it enter the room, where does it leave the building, and which side of the wall is the nest on? Ants are helpfully consistent about this: the line they walk is the line to the nest, and a few minutes spent following it is worth more than any amount of product.

Treatment is then aimed at the colony. Bait is placed on the active trail and carried back by the workers to the nest, which is what reaches the part of the colony that is actually producing the problem. Where the nest itself is accessible - under a slab, in a wall void, at a doorstep - it can be treated directly. Broadcast spraying across a kitchen is what we are trying to avoid, not what we are selling.

What you can do that genuinely helps

• Leave the trail alone until the visit. Wiping it away removes the map.
• Do not spray it, for the fragmentation reason above.
• Clear the food source that is attracting the stream - it does not solve the problem, but it stops the colony being rewarded while treatment works.
• Once bait is down, leave it alone. Cleaning it away is the most common reason ant treatment underperforms.

Flying Ants and What They Actually Mean

For a short spell each summer, mature nests release winged males and new queens at more or less the same time across a wide area. It is dramatic, it is brief, and it is not an infestation of the property they emerge next to. What it does tell you is that there is a mature nest close by, which is useful if you have been getting a trail indoors and have not been able to work out where from.

Ants in Ground-Floor Flats and Garden Properties

Ground-floor flats, garden flats and terraced houses with a paved yard produce most of the ant enquiries we take, and for a straightforward reason: a nest under a patio, a path or a doorstep is only ever a few centimetres from the inside of the building. Upper-floor flats get ants far less often, and when they do it is usually worth checking whether the route is a cavity or a service riser rather than the front door.