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How To Identify And Eliminate Odorous House Ants · PEST PROSpectives

• 0:08
  Richard Piet: I'm Richard Piet.
• 0:09
  Richard Piet: Welcome back to Pest Prospectives.
• 0:12
  Richard Piet: This is the podcast from the Pest Pros of Michigan, talking about the creepy crawlies and the things you should know about pest control.
• 0:21
  Richard Piet: Important stuff.
• 0:22
  Richard Piet: Amber Byars is an ACE, and we mean that.
• 0:26
  Richard Piet: She knows her stuff, supervises the field operations at Pest Pros of Michigan, and she is familiar with something called odorous house ants.
• 0:38
  Richard Piet: Hi, Amber.
• 0:39
  Amber Byars: Hey, Richard.
• 0:40
  Amber Byars: Love that name, right?
• 0:42
  Richard Piet: I yeah, so I'm lingering on that because yeah, I think about stink bugs, and I remember saying during our stink bug conversation, you know, I I don't know if my nose doesn't work or what I don't smell stink bugs, but odorous house ants, because the name odorous is there, that sounds worse than stink.
• 1:05
  Richard Piet: It they really do smell.
• 1:08
  Amber Byars: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09
  Amber Byars: They they have that name for a reason.
• 1:11
  Amber Byars: So odorous house ants, now it it might sound kind of cruel, but if you if you squish them, they explode with a it's almost like a rotten fruit smell.
• 1:21
  Amber Byars: So it's really good for texts to know um if they're trying to ID uh an ant in the field.
• 1:27
  Amber Byars: That's one of the key characteristics, is if you squish one and smell it.
• 1:30
  Amber Byars: Very similar.
• 1:31
  Amber Byars: I I don't remember um if it was me and you that did this, but we were talking about citronella ants, and we're saying like they literally smell like citronella, same concept except they stink really bad.
• 1:42
  Richard Piet: Yeah, I think we'd like the citronella better.
• 1:44
  Amber Byars: Absolutely.
• 1:45
  Richard Piet: So what do these ants look like compared to, I don't know, carpenter ants and various other ants?
• 1:52
  Amber Byars: Yeah, so they're really small, they're like one sixteenth of an inch to one inch, they're tiny.
• 1:58
  Amber Byars: Um, they move pretty quickly.
• 2:00
  Amber Byars: Um, they have very large colonies, and their colonies can uh do something called bud, they're budding colonies where they'll like separate from themselves, they'll like um break away and create uh little pockets of colonies.
• 2:12
  Amber Byars: So that can be a headache for our clients.
• 2:15
  Richard Piet: Oh my goodness.
• 2:16
  Richard Piet: So when when they're very tiny, we might not even realize what we're looking at.
• 2:23
  Amber Byars: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:23
  Amber Byars: Well, you know, some folks with bad eyesight might want to want a professional to come look, but you can you can tell pretty clearly that they're an ant and they're usually um in pretty large numbers trailing.
• 2:35
  Amber Byars: And I've I see a lot of them um in the in the kitchen, by the sink, around like very sweet foods or or nectars or syrups, things like that, spillage.
• 2:46
  Amber Byars: So if something spills and you don't know, here come the odorous house ants, and there'll be a lot of them.
• 2:52
  Richard Piet: Okay, so that part is very typical, isn't it?
• 2:55
  Richard Piet: We have, I think, a perception that ants love sweet stuff.
• 3:00
  Richard Piet: It's true for them.
• 3:01
  Amber Byars: It absolutely is, yeah.
• 3:03
  Richard Piet: So if you take away the sweets and you pack things up, put the syrup away, that sort of thing, does that take care of it?
• 3:11
  Amber Byars: No, not necessarily.
• 3:12
  Amber Byars: They will also, you know, seek out harborage areas, um, nesting sites.
• 3:16
  Amber Byars: So if they're around, they will um they'll make themselves known.
• 3:20
  Amber Byars: They'll come out and you'll you'll it'll be pretty clear.
• 3:23
  Amber Byars: It's not necessarily just a source issue.
• 3:26
  Richard Piet: Okay.
• 3:27
  Richard Piet: And they're small, but they still stink.
• 3:31
  Amber Byars: Yeah, yes, absolutely.
• 3:32
  Amber Byars: Yeah, they do.
• 3:33
  Amber Byars: It's it's the weirdest thing.
• 3:35
  Amber Byars: Like um, something that we find pretty cool because we're bug nerds, but um not not great for a client, you know.
• 3:42
  Amber Byars: They're cleaning up a mess or they're you know wiping down the counter, trying to clean up the ants that way.
• 3:47
  Amber Byars: There can be that kind of pungent smell.
• 3:49
  Richard Piet: Okay.
• 3:50
  Richard Piet: Wow.
• 3:51
  Richard Piet: So I'm wondering that that seems unusual to me.
• 3:56
  Richard Piet: Uh and folks who are smelling this, maybe they're smelling it, but not necessarily seeing the bug right away.
• 4:04
  Richard Piet: What's that smell?
• 4:05
  Richard Piet: And they they might not realize what we're dealing with.
• 4:08
  Amber Byars: Maybe I've never seen that or heard of that, but that's a possibility.
• 4:12
  Richard Piet: Okay.
• 4:13
  Richard Piet: So they're not that small, not that small.
• 4:15
  Amber Byars: I mean, definitely um clear to the naked eye for sure.
• 4:18
  Amber Byars: And back to like the sweets and the the syrupy um materials, they will definitely switch over to other food sources as well, proteins and things like that.
• 4:29
  Richard Piet: Okay.
• 4:30
  Richard Piet: Uh, and as you said, they branch off and have sort of sub-colonies.
• 4:36
  Richard Piet: This could be tricky.
• 4:38
  Amber Byars: Yeah, so it it's a process called budding.
• 4:40
  Amber Byars: So they'll they'll break away.
• 4:42
  Amber Byars: Um, carpenter ants are very similar.
• 4:44
  Amber Byars: Well, they'll have satellite colonies around, but um, the budding process is very interesting with the with the odorous house ants.
• 4:51
  Amber Byars: And again, if it's a structural issue, um, that can make control very challenging.
• 4:57
  Richard Piet: Yeah.
• 4:57
  Richard Piet: So the odorous ants, I mean, we know carpenter ants kind of like wood and and that sort of thing.
• 5:02
  Richard Piet: What about these guys with the with the sweet stuff?
• 5:06
  Richard Piet: They're attracted to that and proteins, but when they make their colony or their when they bud and they go away, what makes them comfortable otherwise?
• 5:16
  Richard Piet: Do they want to be near that stuff or do they go travel to it?
• 5:20
  Amber Byars: You know, they're really diverse.
• 5:21
  Amber Byars: You can find them a lot of plACEs.
• 5:23
  Amber Byars: They will nest pretty much anywhere inside.
• 5:26
  Amber Byars: You're looking at, like in the wall voids, beneath flooring, insulation by pipes, like leaky pipe fixtures.
• 5:34
  Amber Byars: Um, outside, you're looking at you they could be underneath firewood that's stacked up.
• 5:40
  Amber Byars: They could be exposed.
• 5:42
  Amber Byars: I found these these big nests in garage framing, like the exposed framing, um, where they're kind of all right out in the open, and then the trail starts from there.
• 5:53
  Richard Piet: Oh boy.
• 5:54
  Richard Piet: Okay.
• 5:54
  Richard Piet: So they could find a comfortable spot in a lot of plACEs.
• 5:59
  Richard Piet: So they could be anywhere.
• 6:01
  Amber Byars: Anywhere.
• 6:01
  Amber Byars: Yeah.
• 6:02
  Amber Byars: Yeah.
• 6:02
  Amber Byars: They're very diverse.
• 6:04
  Amber Byars: They can acclimate pretty well.
• 6:06
  Richard Piet: So, how do you attack it?
• 6:07
  Richard Piet: When you uh discover odorous house ants are the problem, how do you approach it?
• 6:13
  Amber Byars: So, with most of the time on the inside, it's very rare that we can actually find the colony or the nest.
• 6:19
  Amber Byars: So we do our thorough integrated pest management inspection, of course.
• 6:24
  Amber Byars: We try to see if there's anything conducive on the property that is attractive to them that we can educate the client on.
• 6:31
  Amber Byars: Uh, there's some spillage here, or hey, the door is left wide open, or whatever the case is, or there's really a lot of access points here.
• 6:41
  Amber Byars: They're so small that that could be pretty much the whole home.
• 6:44
  Amber Byars: But as far as interior treatment, we would start there with attacking what the where the activity is.
• 6:51
  Amber Byars: And we utilize gel bait most of the time for initial services where we will test out a few different baits that we have because during certain times of the year, again, we know that they're really a sugary ant.
• 7:03
  Amber Byars: So we try high sugar baits first, but sometimes they're not attracted to that.
• 7:08
  Amber Byars: And though we'll try other baits.
• 7:10
  Amber Byars: So baiting is the first option for sure.
• 7:13
  Amber Byars: It's very, it's non-invasive.
• 7:16
  Amber Byars: Um, you can do it very discreetly.
• 7:18
  Amber Byars: And if they're feeding on the bait, then we can put enough bait down where they can take that back into the colony.
• 7:26
  Richard Piet: That was going to be my next question.
• 7:28
  Richard Piet: So the bait then travels back with them.
• 7:31
  Amber Byars: Yeah.
• 7:32
  Amber Byars: Yeah.
• 7:32
  Amber Byars: So a lot of the baits on the market right now have that transfer effect to them, the non-repellent transfer horizontal effect effect, however you want to call it, where if they consume that bait and then they groom each other and they share food between each other, that's all being passed along.
• 7:51
  Richard Piet: Okay.
• 7:51
  Richard Piet: Yeah.
• 7:51
  Richard Piet: Uh, so that is the most common way that you would attack it then.
• 7:58
  Richard Piet: You can't find the colony.
• 7:59
  Richard Piet: So you've got to have them either come to you or it's got to go back somehow.
• 8:03
  Amber Byars: Yeah.
• 8:03
  Amber Byars: And so um, how we train our guys is, you know, if there's an adequate amount of activity that they're going that we can bait, do that.
• 8:10
  Amber Byars: Uh apply uh a gel bait in an in enough amount where it will control them.
• 8:15
  Amber Byars: If there's not, because sometimes we get on the property and it's so weird.
• 8:18
  Amber Byars: This happens so often that when the pest control people come, everything's gone.
• 8:23
  Amber Byars: Like they're nowhere in sight.
• 8:25
  Amber Byars: They they've went they've gone away um by the time we got there.
• 8:29
  Amber Byars: So later on that night they'll be back.
• 8:31
  Amber Byars: So sometimes it's more appropriate at that point, if we're not physically seeing them, to really pick our clients' brains on where the trail was, where they're seeing them, then apply a non-repellent liquid product.
• 8:43
  Amber Byars: Um, liquid products can stay, they're residual, they can last a really long time.
• 8:47
  Amber Byars: And so we'll leave that product in really heavily populated areas where the client was noticing them, and we'll do spot treatments there.
• 8:55
  Amber Byars: So that way when they come back, that product will be there.
• 8:58
  Amber Byars: The hard problem with baiting for ants that aren't physically present is we don't know what they're going to be attracted to or receptive of.
• 9:07
  Amber Byars: So we will lean into the the non-repellent liquid instead, which works really, really well.
• 9:12
  Richard Piet: So they're smart because they they come out at opportune times and they seem to know when to retreat.
• 9:19
  Richard Piet: And this makes it more complicated, doesn't it?
• 9:22
  Amber Byars: Yeah.
• 9:23
  Amber Byars: And sometimes, you know, it could just be that they've came out and they've gotten the resources that they need and they're taking it back into the colony, and it just happens to be a coincidence at that point.
• 9:33
  Amber Byars: But um, but yeah, it's just funnily, like sometimes when we get on the property, everything has dispersed.
• 9:40
  Amber Byars: And so we have to have multiple tactics to be able to control them at that point.
• 9:44
  Amber Byars: Um, exterior treatments are great because again, odorous house hands will come up from the inside, from the outside in.
• 9:51
  Amber Byars: And so we are we're gonna be looking for transitional points where they could have accessed the home.
• 9:56
  Amber Byars: So barrier treatments are great.
• 9:57
  Amber Byars: Again, non-repellent products, so we can get that good horizontal transfer between the insects that way.
• 10:03
  Amber Byars: But exterior treatments are absolutely a big part of an odorous house hand treatment, especially if we notice that the colony is primarily outdoors.
• 10:12
  Richard Piet: So is that a winter-summer difference?
• 10:16
  Richard Piet: You might do a perimeter kind of outside treatment in the summer, or does it not matter?
• 10:23
  Amber Byars: Yeah, so um the in the winter, it's much less likely that we'll be doing exterior treatments with liquid, unless we have a day like today in Michigan where it's almost 60 degrees.
• 10:34
  Amber Byars: So um we could definitely utilize some exterior liquid applications today, but most of the time we're gonna be doing crack and crevice treatments.
• 10:42
  Amber Byars: We could utilize dust, we could utilize that gel bait, especially if we're seeing them actually enter the structure.
• 10:49
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 10:49
  Richard Piet: So seasonal situations um apply in these cases.
• 10:54
  Richard Piet: So that's uh something to expect.
• 10:56
  Richard Piet: What else should a homeowner expect when all of a sudden uh they have these ants, you've come to treat them, and they're gone, right?
• 11:09
  Richard Piet: It's over.
• 11:10
  Amber Byars: Yeah, I wish that would make that would make our jobs and our clients so much happier and easier.
• 11:17
  Amber Byars: But no, um, we're really good at explaining and setting that expectation up front, um, especially with an ant colony, and as as populated as an odorous ant colony can get, that that takes some time.
• 11:29
  Amber Byars: So the non-repellent products, they are designed to be very, very slow acting intentionally to get to the queens of the colony.
• 11:38
  Amber Byars: Um, one thing that we uh train against with ants, especially a colony of ants, if we're attacking an active issue, is to stay away from the repellent products, the repellency-based insecticides, because that will do a lot of good up front for the worker ants, the ones that they're seeing physically.
• 11:58
  Amber Byars: It will kill them pretty quickly.
• 12:00
  Amber Byars: But the long-term success rate is very low because it doesn't make it back into the colony wherever the colony is.
• 12:06
  Amber Byars: Again, some most of the time we're treating for these ants, we're not sure where the colony is located.
• 12:13
  Amber Byars: Sometimes, by happenstance, we can find it by a thorough inspection, and that takes a lot of time.
• 12:18
  Amber Byars: Um, or sometimes you'll just get lucky and you'll find one right out in the open.
• 12:21
  Amber Byars: But if not, we really want to make sure that we're using the right products.
• 12:25
  Amber Byars: Um, a lot of the times homeowners will go buy over-the-counter products like RAID and they'll treat themselves absolutely, but then they'll get that frustration afterwards because it didn't take care of not getting to the source at that point.
• 12:39
  Amber Byars: I I know, and we've done a a DIY um podcast before, and so that all is very relevant.
• 12:46
  Richard Piet: Yeah, check it out.
• 12:47
  Richard Piet: If you haven't subscribed, by the way, to Pest Perspectives, do that, and then you'll hear when these episodes come available, and you can pick and choose the ones that might apply to your situation.
• 12:57
  Richard Piet: Is there any kind of structural concern with odorous house ants?
• 13:01
  Richard Piet: Are they that destructive?
• 13:03
  Amber Byars: Um, not no, they're just no real structural concern.
• 13:06
  Amber Byars: Um, they're not a like health threat or anything.
• 13:09
  Amber Byars: They are a huge nuisance.
• 13:11
  Amber Byars: There's also like outside, I don't think we touched on this earlier, but harborage areas outside can cause some issues for the structure as far as trees touching.
• 13:21
  Amber Byars: Odorous halcians will tend to aphids.
• 13:24
  Amber Byars: They'll use them for that sugary material that they excrete, the aphids with the honeydew.
• 13:28
  Amber Byars: And so what we see a lot is that can also transfer into a home if that tree or bush or whatever that they're tending these aphids on is contacting the structure, then that can cause an entryway in or at least give them a leg up on that.
• 13:44
  Amber Byars: So we will always recommend, as far as structurally goes, to trim back vegetation, make sure things are nice and tight and sealed up.
• 13:52
  Amber Byars: But again, um, exclusion with ants is is almost impossible because they're just so small and opportunistic that they will find um a way in unless you sealed up every single millimeter of a home, which just doesn't happen.
• 14:06
  Amber Byars: But no structural damage related though.
• 14:10
  Richard Piet: Okay.
• 14:10
  Richard Piet: Well, that's uh helpful to know.
• 14:12
  Richard Piet: But nevertheless, if you're looking around on the outside of the house, you're gonna see some of these things.
• 14:18
  Richard Piet: We've talked about the the vegetation and things that could be a pathway.
• 14:22
  Richard Piet: You're gonna be looking for that.
• 14:24
  Amber Byars: Yeah, absolutely.
• 14:25
  Amber Byars: Mulch right up against the structure, the vegetation, trees touching, moisture issues, leaks, anything like that.
• 14:33
  Richard Piet: Okay.
• 14:33
  Richard Piet: You see ants, you smell ants in this case.
• 14:37
  Richard Piet: You'll want to reach out and talk with Amber and the team at Pest Pros and ask about it.
• 14:43
  Richard Piet: It could be odorous house ants.
• 14:46
  Richard Piet: P U.
• 14:46
  Richard Piet: We don't want that.
• 14:47
  Richard Piet: All right.
• 14:49
  Richard Piet: Details in the show notes.
• 14:51
  Richard Piet: Click through, find more of our episodes, and lots of information on the Pest Pros website as well.
• 14:57
  Richard Piet: Amber Byars, Pest Pros, thank you.
• 15:00
  Amber Byars: Of course, thank you.