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PHARAOH ANTS
NESTING - In domestic situations, nests of Pharaoh
Ants are unstructured. This ant tends to occupy
any crack or crevice which has a suitable microclimate,
rather than the physical construction of a nest
with tunnels and chambers. In infested buildings,
ants are often most numerous around areas where
high temperature and humidity prevail (i.e. air
conditioning units, boiler houses, heating ducts,
kitchens, laundries and window ledges). Outside
these areas, the ants are most often found in contact
with their parent colony within the same structure.
The nests were observed to occur in almost any secluded
spot, between the walls or under the floors or behind
the baseboards, or among trash, in the lawn or garden.
FOOD & FORAGING - Pharaoh Ants are omnivorous.
They feed on a wide variety of foods including fats,
proteins and carbohydrates and will also take and
kill small insects. Once a foraging worker locates
a food source, it lays a chemical trail from the
food to the nest. Returning workers enter the nest
and excite other workers to follow the trail to
the food source. These chemical trails are often
many meters long.
CONTROL - Eradication of Pharaoh Ants from an infested
premises is expensive, laborious and time consuming
due to the biology of this pest. Conventional control
techniques include the use of residual insecticides
applied as sprays and/or baits containing slow-acting
poisons. Residual insecticide sprays do not generally
reach the nest and may actually aggravate the problem
by causing large colonies to fractionate into several
smaller colonies. Baiting is currently the easiest
method of eliminating Pharaoh Ant infestations.
This technique has several advantages over residual
sprays or dusts. First, bait placement is often
less disruptive to residents than is a treatment
involving residual sprays. Second, the active ingredient
in a bait will be transported by foraging workers
to the nest and nestmates, which may be inaccessible
to residual sprays.
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