If you've already hired or are looking to hire an exterminator or a pest control service to help you get your ant problem under control, you're one step closer to protecting your home and your family from unwanted pests.

To ensure your upcoming ant control treatment is a success, you will need to follow some of the necessary preparation steps prepared by Melbourne's exceptional pest control technicians. Before you schedule a visit with Melbourne's finest, you'll be given detailed instructions on how to prepare your home for the ant control treatment. A little bit of prep on your end will increase your chances of taking care of your ant problem for good, so make sure you take the time to go over their instructions and prep your home before the technicians arrive.Let's review those steps so you can be fully prepared when the technicians arrive.

Here's what you'll need to do to prep your home for ant control service:

Prepare to leave your home

All occupants, including your family and your pets, will need to stay away from the house for at least 4 hours while the team of technicians do their work.

Move furniture away from walls

Try to move all furniture away from the walls, if possible.

Clean up

Scour your floors and countertops and vacuum all surfaces, including rugs, carpets and furniture. Vacuum behind furniture and in corners to remove any built-up dust and debris. Throw out any trash and leftover food and empty out all the trash cans in your home.

Tidy up your home

Remove any loose items and debris around the home. Throw out what you don't need and store the rest. That way loose toys, clothing and other such items can't get in the way and make your technician's job harder.

Empty out closets and cupboards

If you wish your closets, cupboards and cabinets to be treated, remove all items from them and store them in bags or storage containers.

Secure personal items

Things like bathroom toiletries, accessories and other personal items should be stored in cabinets or drawers.

Wash the dishes

Wash any dirty dishes and tableware, or place them in the dishwasher, leaving your counters and sink clean. Dispose of any leftover food or safely store it in the fridge.

Take note of any ant activity

Take note of all the areas in your home where you have noticed ant activity as well as any rustling sounds you might have heard within your home's wood structures. These notes will be beneficial to your pest control specialist as they'll be useful in identifying the infested areas easier and faster.

Keep a live sample of the pest

If you can, try to provide a live sample of the ant in a glass jar so the technician can better identify it and apply the appropriate methods to eliminate the problem.

Once you've completed all the steps on the list, it's time for Melbourne's finest pest control technicians to get to work and do their best to get your ant problem in control.

While not as dangerous to your health and home as other pests, ants can be quite annoying and troublesome. If they locate a food source in your home, they’ll send off signals to the rest of the colony, and soon enough you’ll have a big problem on your hands.

If you need help identifying your ant problem or figuring out if you’re dealing with an infestation, here are the top 5 signs to look for that will help you determine the magnitude of your problem.

In this article, we’ll show you a few tricks for tracking down ants as well as give you some advice on how to prevent such problems from occurring in the first place.

5 Signs of an Ant Infestation to Look Out For

Not all ants can be harmful and destructive to your home. However, they are never a welcome sight to see especially in the kitchen, which is why on-time identification is crucial so you can put an end to the infestation before the colony multiplies and spreads to other areas of your home.

Some of the easiest, telltale signs that will help you figure out if you’re dealing with an ant infestation include:

1. You’ve seen a colony close to your house

While this doesn’t have to mean that you’ll definitely have an ant problem down the road, since ants travel long distances to forage for food, they might start looking for that source of food inside your home.

If you have an ant colony near your house, the best thing you can do to prevent an infestation from occurring is to seal off any cracks, and crevices ants might use to get in, keep your home clean and free of easily accessible food sources and implement natural ant repellent solutions such as a mixture of peppermint oil and water, lemon juice, cinnamon, cayenne pepper and so on. These will help you deter ants and destroy their scent trail, so they don’t go into your home looking for food.

2. You see ants all over your food

While you should never leave leftover food unattended and not stored properly, if you have some source of food that’s easily accessible, such as on the counter or even on the floor (typically from spills or pet dishes), ants will get drawn to that source of food, and soon enough the entire area will be overrun by them. If your food gets overrun by ants, you likely have a colony nearby that sensed the food and came to carry it away to their nest.

3. Inspect your woodwork

Look for wood shavings and sawdust around your woodwork to check for signs of ant activity. Carpenter ants, as the name suggests, tend to dig out tunnels in wood and build nests inside. They can do quite extensive damage to your woodwork and before you know it they might cause structural damage as well. If you suspect that you might be dealing with either carpenter ants or termites, you should contact a professional pest control specialists to examine the situation and figure out the best plan of action.

4. Listen to activity in the walls

If you’re dealing with a carpenter ant infestation or a termite infestation, you’ll likely be able to hear some rustling noises coming from your walls when you listen closely. This occurs mostly at night since carpenter ants are nocturnal insects. To check if there’s a colony of ants living inside your woodwork or in your walls, simply look for a hollow sound when you tap the surface of the wood.

5. Inspect damp areas

This step is particularly useful for carpenter ants, as they tend to live in moisture-prone areas such as wet wood, or areas near your kitchen and bathroom. They can hide in damp places, so make sure you check for leaks and fix them as soon as a problem occurs.

Ants travel in groups and will most likely enter your home in the spring or autumn. 

While it’s quite difficult, even impossible to keep your house pest-free all the time, there are certain preventative methods you can use to keep your home ant-free as long as possible.

Let’s take a look at some of the most effective and easy solutions to achieve that!

1. Outdoor preventative measures

In order to prevent ant infestations from occurring you need to take certain measures that will deter them from your home before they ever enter it.

While store-bought ant killer sprays provide instant results, this way you will just destroy a part of the colony which means the problem can reappear later on. The safest and most reliable plan to go with is to use repellent sprays to deter ants and prevent them from reaching the inside of your home.

This way, you can avoid using harmful chemicals that can destroy all insects, even the beneficial ones, yet still get the result you were hoping for. 

Here are some of the best natural ant repellents you can use to help you destroy the trails ants leave behind for the rest of the colony to follow, so they can lose the scent and change their course.

• A mixture of peppermint oil and water sprayed around the perimeter of your home will stop ants from getting inside, as they hate the smell and will stay away from it.

• A mixture of vinegar and water sprayed around windows and doors will also keep ants from coming inside.

• A solution of one part lemon juice and three parts water, used as a spray similarly to the previous methods we mentioned.

• A spray made of a few drops of cinnamon essential oil mixed with water applied near your home’s entry points.

In addition to using ant repellent around the perimeter of your house and around windows, doors and cracks, there’s one more measure you can take to make sure your home is ant proof. This step includes sealing off any cracks, crevices and other entry points that can be used by ants. Such entry points can be typically found around windows and doors, around pipe and cable openings and so on.

2. Indoor preventative measures

The main indoor preventative measures you can take include:

• Storing leftover food and open bags of snacks properly

• Keeping a tight lid on your trash can and taking out your trash regularly

• Storing your trash bins outside the garage rather than inside

• Fixing any moisture problems such as leaking piles and faucets as soon as you spot the problem

• Cleaning your kitchen floor, countertops and cabinets regularly, making sure there are no crumbs or leftover food that ants can track and find

• Limiting where you eat and making a habit of eating in the dining room and kitchen, not in the bedroom and living room