About a week and a half ago, I noticed a single large black ant in my kitchen. I squished it (it was bloody or something like it, IIRC), tossed it, looked for any companions. Saw none, forgot about it until I saw a second large black ant in my bedroom, which is on the opposite end of the apartment. I looked; again, I couldn’t find any sign of any others, though I know that ants are rarely alone.
What should I be looking out for, and how concerned should I be for some kind of infestation? I rent, so I’ll be able to get a lot of help, but I could do without the hassle.
We get black ants every spring. Some springs, we even get a few huge ones with wings.
I set out ant traps, and that seems to help. Regardless, they show up for 4-6 weeks, then they go away for the rest of the year. On the top days, we see maybe as many as 4 or 6 a day, wandering around various places. Once we set up the traps, that goes down to maybe 1 every few days, then after a few weeks, they’re gone for a year.
It’s an assumption, true. But it’s also a large complex, not just a single building. If nothing’s done… Well, I was considering moving anyway.
And I asked in the first place because I’d never seen ants indoors before in my place. It’s on the second floor, too. It just left me wondering if it was the harbinger of something nasty.
I think landlord-complaining is really location dependent - I’ve had five or six landlords and they’ve all been great. If I thought I actually had an ant problem, pretty much all of them would have been out to evaluate it within a couple of days at most, or sent an exterminator to consult, or whatever you’d actually do for a real ant problem. I’ve never rented in, say, LA or NYC or SF though, just smaller cities (Baltimore was the largest) where there was a more even renter-landlord balance of power/demand.
That said, as Athena notes, I wouldn’t really think of one ant every week or two as a problem. Stop leaving so much food sitting around and you won’t get ants!
You should always be concerned about ants. They are evil little bastards. Get some Terro, the gel stuff that comes in little dispensers for the ants to go in and carry it back to their friends. They don’t sell it everywhere (a lot of places sell other stuff that doesn’t work nearly as well) but find Terro.
We’re dealing with ants right now too, and it’s fairly annoying. My husband bought some of those Terro traps so hopefully we’ll notice an improvement soon. I’m seeing probably 5 or so per day, but in all different areas of the house. Eh, I’d rather deal with them than the daddy long legs we usually see!
ants will do regular foraging. they have scouts look for food and then report back when some large amount is found. when you see many is when you have a problem.
The ants might be attracted to food left out by a neighbor; the OP may not have any food sitting around at all. That’s the main reason for bringing in the landlord; someone else in the multi-unit building may be acting irresponsibly.
I don’t worry about them unless I see a line. Ants are pretty much everywhere and will send out scouts when the pickens get hard t find. If I do find a line of ants it is pretty easy to figure out what they are after. I simply remove it and they go away.
Ant #3 on my couch just now. That’s one in the kitchen in June, one in the bedroom in July, and one in the living room now. Still not seeing any others, but this place is kinda messy right now. (Which may help, although food isn’t generally involved.)
I came home to a line of ants last week. They were coming in through a bedroom wall, through that room, through the living room and still marching through the kitchen to a tiny piece of bacon under the stove. I’ve never seen an ant line work its way through three rooms before and I was pretty freaked out but I needed something cat safe and didn’t feel like going to the market.
Hmmm. It turns out you can mix cinnamon and black pepper and just sprinkle it along the ant line. One hour later they were completely gone and I haven’t seen a single scout since. No kidding.
