Ants and Your Health
Thought ants aren’t a huge source of health issues, they have disease spreading potential. They scavenge for food in dark, wet and nasty places then traipse dirty feet across your floors, tables and counters. Plus, some ants can bite and sting. Fire ants have a nasty bite that causes blisters on the skin. The Bulldog Ant will bite if provoked.

The Life of the Ant
Ants live in large nests built in your walls, in the spaces below the floor, between your pavers and even in dead wooden trees. At the centre of the ant colony is the queen, a fertile female that spends her days laying eggs. She can live up to ten years and when she dies another female will take her place. The queen is attended by sterile worker females who do all the chores including foraging for food and tending to the larvae hatched by the queen. The few males in the nest are winged and fly a mating flight with the queen, mate and then die. Expect colonies to contain 500,000 ants or more!

Types of Ants
White-footed House Ant: the White-footed House ant is strangely named as the workers actually have yellow feet! They are attracted to sweets in the home such as sugar or spilled soft drinks. These pests build their nests both above and below ground, favouring areas such as trees and wall spaces. They can have millions of workers in a nest and several smaller ‘satellite’ nests constructed about your yard.

The Odorous House Ant is named aptly because of the rotten odour released if you squish one underfoot. These black/brown pests like to build nests in areas of the home that have a ready water source, such as a wall recess under a leaky pipe.

Carpenter Ants are the largest Australian ant, with the workers growing to be up to 10mm. These primarily black ants construct nests in wood and feed on moist timber. It’s a useful thing in out in the bush where these ants help to speed up decay in rotten wood, but it’s obviously destructive when they take up residence in the spaces of your home to feed on your walls, ceilings and roof. These pests can travel a long way to find food for their large nests of 10,000 workers or more.

In some areas of Australia, fire ants have become prevalent in yards. They rarely enter the home but their dome-shaped nests are easy to step on. Their sting is painful and they are aggressive in attacking, leaving small blisters prone to infection on their victims.

In Conclusion
A single ant in your home means there’s an army lurking, waiting to invade. A pest control professional will be able to identify and treat the individual species.