Archive for February, 2012

Preventing An Ant Bite

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

If you happen to see numerous ant hills popping up in your yard during the summer, you should take precautions for preventing an ant bite. Generally speaking, many ants do not bite they just steal your food. However, the ants that do bite, such as the red fire ant, will bite hard and painfully. It is best to avoid them.

ant bite

The first method of preventing an ant bite is, of course, to stay away from the ants. Do not go around poking sticks at ant hills and stepping on them for fun. This is a very bad idea. Most of the time, people accidentally step on ant hills or put their furniture on them, thus disturbing the ants and making them angry. Make sure you look around the ground before you set down your lawn chair. Ants do not like to be disturbed.

If you are able to safely do so, get rid of the ant hill. One method of getting rid of ants is to flush them out with a water hose. Ants do not like water and they are not able to swim, so flushing them out of their colony will destroy them. However, be aware that provoking a fore ant hill is asking for them to attack you, so perhaps this is not the most enticing method of getting rid of the ant hills.

Fire ants, like all ants, have limitations. Certain foods and plants create natural borders for them. By sprinkling an ant hill with coffee grinds, you are applying a natural border they will not pass. Once you have created a natural border on and around the ant hill, cover the mound with baby powder. Baby powder, or talc powder, smothers the ants naturally in their environment.

If you have a spray bottle, put some water and white vinegar into the bottle and spray the ant hills. Vinegar is a natural ant repellant and will keep the ants in their colony. This will not kill them, merely repel them, therefore, smothering them with talk or flushing them out may be used in combination with this method.

For yourself, if you are out camping, again, avoiding ant hill is the first way to prevent an ant bite. Also, cover your skin in a protective substance. Ants do not like vinegar or lemon juice. If you have either of these items handy, mix them with water and spray your skin. The smell of spearmint also keeps away ants, by rubbing spearmint leaves on your skin you give yourself less risk of being bitten should you happen to step on an ant hill accidentally. These are not guaranteed methods, merely preventive measure. The best method for preventing an ant bite is to avoid the ant.

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How To Safely Get Rid Of Ants In The House

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

There are many methods as to how to get rid of ants in the house, but many of them involve harmful chemicals. These chemicals that will kill ants are also harmful to you, to your children, and to your pets. For this reason, you should use one of these safe but effective methods.

how to get rid of ants in the house

If you know where the nest is, you can actually destroy it by pouring boiling water down into the nest. If you pour about 3 gallons of boiling water, it should be enough to get all the way to the queen. This is a good method, but won’t work if you don’t get the queen, and it’s not always just one nest that is invading your house.

Black pepper and cayenne pepper are both great repellents. Ants simply do not like the smell of them, and so they will avoid anywhere they come across either. The best way to use these is to sprinkle them liberally along the walls, and in windows and doors wherever ants are coming in. These are easy to clean up after if you need to, and will not damage carpets or furniture. It is also completely safe for children and pets.

You can also use cinnamon in the same way. Cinnamon is great because it is fairly cheap, easy to find in bulk, and smells much nicer than black or cayenne pepper. If you are having a hard time finding the nest or if you just want to cut back on the number of ants in your garden, you can sprinkle cinnamon throughout your backyard or garden. Eventually, this will greatly decrease the ant population in your yard or garden, which will help eliminate the ant population in your house.

The most powerful of these safe and effective ant repellants is vinegar. It’s naturally pungent odor quite effectively repels ants. You can easily put this in a spray bottle and with the stream method coat the corners of doors, windows, and walls in vinegar. Once it dries, the residue will continue to repel ants. You can also use this directly on the anthill, which will force them to move their nest. Vinegar is also safe for your carpets and furniture, and can actually be used as a cleaning agent.

By using any of these methods alone or combining them, you will be able to get rid of ants in the house both safely and effectively.

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Information On Ant Extermination Methods

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

If you have an ant problem, it is important to have all the information you can on and extermination. Not all exterminators are the same, and it’s important to know the correct methods that they should be following in order to be sure the ant problem in your home is being resolved.

ant extermination

In order to actually exterminate a nest of ants, you have to take out their queen. A queen ant can live for up to 30 years, and the average colony has millions of ants. Ant colonies exist wherever there is enough space for an ant to walk. They usually live underground, which could just as easily be under your car as it could be under your grass. They can also take up residence in the walls of your house, where they can become very destructive as they dig tunnels in which to live.

Ant exterminators have three steps that they follow in order to properly destroy the nest of the invading ants and keep them from getting into your house. The first step is to locate the nest. The second step is to lay out an edible pesticide. The third step is to drench the nest in pesticide. While each type of ant is different and requires a different approach to extermination, this method is considered the best, and will work with almost every kind of ant.

If you hire an exterminator who simply spays some pesticides around your house, they do not really know what they are doing, and the ants will return within a few days. Ants are experts at what they do, and will quickly find a safe route to get to their food source: your food. That is why it is extremely important to eliminate the entire nest and to kill the queen to prevent the ants from coming back. A good exterminator knows how to look for signs of ants, and will ask the right questions to find out the type of ant he’s dealing with. He will find the nest, and go from there.

Once he’s located the nest, he will spread an edible pesticide around the nest. The ants will eat this, and will carry it into the nest. The hope here is that they will feed it to the queen, which will either kill her or make her infertile. This should also kill a lot of the larvae and other ants within the colony.

Next, the rest of the colony must be eliminated in a drench method. The best experts on ant extermination will use an organic pesticide that won’t harm your yard or pets, but will effectively destroy all the remaining ants in the colony.

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Easy Ant Bite Treatment

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

Once you’ve identified an ant bite, you can begin to treat it. Ant bites appear as small raised red spots that contain a white pus spot, much like a pimple. They are itchy, and can sometimes become infected with excessive itching.

ant bite treatment

Normal ant bites are not very serious, and will usually last less than a week if they are not scratched even if they are not treated with anything. However, the can be incredibly itchy, especially if there is more than one bite. At that point, you have several options. Calamine lotion is an excellent anti-itch cream and is safe to use. You can also use a hydrocortisone cream. If you’ve had problems with either of these medications in the past, be sure to check with your doctor first before applying them, and always read labels first.

If you have been itching the bites or they have opened up at all, be sure to wash them thoroughly with soap and water every day to prevent infection. You can also apply a topical antibiotic ointment so long as only the top layers of skin are broken.

Some people can have allergic reactions to ant bites. This can even happen if you’ve been bitten by ants before, as occasionally you are reacting to what was on the ant’s mouth rather than the bite itself. For example, if you are highly allergic to peanut butter and you get bitten by an ant that has just eaten some peanut butter, you could easily have a reaction.

For allergic reactions that are not severe, you can use a cold compress to help with the swelling and take any type of OTC anti-histamine. If your symptoms are not improving within a couple of days, you should go to your doctor, as something worse might be going on.

Sometimes, ant bites take time to heal, so be willing to wait them out. Prevention is important if you do not want to get bit again. There are many things you can do to prevent getting bit by ants. You can wear shoes outside, shake out any clothing or bags that have been on the ground that could have ants trapped inside, always wear gloves while working in the garden, and use natural ant repellants to keep ants away from areas that you frequent. Preventing an ant bite is usually much easier than treating one after you have one.

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