Bug Blasters Pest Control

Bug Blasters Pest Control serves the St. George area. Ants are the most common call any pest company in this region takes, and they are also the pest where the intuitive response - spraying the ones you can see - is closest to actively counterproductive.

Background

An ant colony is a reproductive unit centered on one or more queens, and the ants visible on a counter or a patio are foragers, a small and entirely replaceable fraction of the whole. Killing foragers with a contact spray removes them and changes nothing about the colony that produced them, which is why the trail reappears within days. Worse, many species respond to a chemical disturbance by budding - splitting the colony and relocating parts of it - so an aggressive spray can turn one nest into several.

Baiting works on the opposite principle. A bait is a slow-acting toxicant carried in something the ants want, and the delay is the whole design: foragers have to survive long enough to return and distribute it through the colony by trophallaxis, the mouth-to-mouth food sharing that ant societies run on. That means resisting the urge to clean up the trail, since the trail is the delivery system. Matching the bait matters too, because species differ in whether they are recruiting to sugars or to proteins and fats, and that preference shifts through the season. The desert adds its own residents to the list - harvester ants clear a wide bare disc around a nest entrance and are best left alone away from walkways, since they are an important part of the local food web and rarely enter buildings.

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Nearby: C S Tops, Webster's Countertops, Marlin Plumbing Heating & Air.