Ant control across the Bay Area

Argentine ants, by a wide margin. They are small, uniformly brown, they do not sting, and their colonies link up with one another instead of fighting, so a single population can run along a whole street. After those, odorous house ants, the ones most people call sugar ants, and pavement ants along driveways and patios. Carpenter ants are the big black ones, and they are the only common local ant that damages wood. Identifying which one you have is the first thing your technician does, because it changes where the treatment goes.

Usually water rather than food. Through a dry Bay Area summer the soil outside gives them nothing to drink, and the nearest reliable moisture is a kitchen sink, a shower pan or a leaking hose bib. Heavy winter rain does the opposite and floods them out of the ground. Either way the colony is almost always still outside, sending scouts in. That is why the treatment starts at the foundation rather than at the counter you are looking at. If yours are turning up in the wet rooms, we wrote about that in ants in the bathroom and ants in the shower.

Through gaps you would not think of as gaps. Around the pipes under a sink, the weep holes and weatherstripping on doors and windows, foundation cracks, vents, and the point where utility lines pass through the wall. Anything touching the siding, a branch, a shrub, a trellis, works as a bridge straight onto the house and past everything we put down at the foundation. Your technician maps these on the first visit rather than treating only the spot where you saw ants.

They can, and they do it slowly enough that most people find them late. Carpenter ants do not eat wood, they hollow galleries out of it to nest in, and they go for wood that is already damp or starting to rot, so they tend to show up around a long-running leak, a bad flashing detail or an eave that never dries out. Signs worth acting on are small piles of what looks like sawdust, wood that sounds hollow when you tap it, and large black ants indoors. Fixing the moisture matters as much as the treatment does. For the difference between them and the ants people confuse them with, see carpenter ants vs fire ants.

Because most over-the-counter products are repellent. They kill the ants you can see and warn the rest off, and a stressed colony responds by splitting into satellite nests in new places. Argentine ants are particularly good at it. You end up with three trails where you had one. Professional work goes the other way, using non-repellent products and baits the workers carry back and share, so the treatment reaches the part of the colony you never see.

Expect it to look worse before it looks better. Non-repellent products are designed not to be detected, so for the first day or two you may see more activity, not less, while the workers are still moving through the treated area and feeding each other. After that the numbers drop off. Some pests take a series of visits to fully control, and ants with an established outdoor colony are one of them, so we would rather set that expectation than promise you a date.

Almost never, and that is deliberate. The goal is to get control of what is inside and then keep working the exterior, so most visits happen entirely outside: the foundation, the entry points, and the trails. Interior work is available whenever you want it and is targeted at the rooms where ants are actually active, usually a baseboard run and the inside of the kitchen cabinets.

Two things. Pull furniture and stored items away from the walls in the rooms you want treated, and if you want the kitchen cabinets done, empty them. You can do that while your technician works the exterior. Then, once a room has been treated, nobody goes back into it for one hour, people and pets both. If the whole interior is being treated, that means everyone is out of the house for the hour. Your technician will tell you when it is fine to go back in.

Ant pressure here is high, and a colony from a neighboring yard will move into the space yours left. That is the honest answer, and it is why most homes do best on a quarterly plan rather than a single visit. If pests come back between visits on your recurring plan, we come back at no charge.

The first one runs between thirty minutes and an hour, because it includes the inspection and the mapping. Visits after that are usually fifteen to thirty minutes. Larger properties take longer. Your technician knocks before starting, walks you through what they are about to do, and knocks again at the end to tell you what they found.