My home is being overrun by ants, despite two visits from pest control experts who have sprayed outside the home. Do ants come in to escape bad weather? Are ant invasions seasonal? Is there a method to their madness?

Yep, my house is overrun with ants, too. They haven’t been in the kitchen, which I count as lucky since they can really put a hitch in the joy of cooking. But I’ve had a zillion tiny roommates for weeks now. I have no secret weapon and I don’t know much about the critters, so I talked to Mike Sheridan, the owner of Sheridan Termite and Pest Control. His company has been battling bugs since 1983 and his knowledge is more than exoskeleton deep.

Sheridan told me that the ants are coming in to escape the bad weather. When it’s cold or rainy, they want to come inside and get warm and dry. But, when it’s too hot and dry, they like to come in to cool off, too. So summer or winter, the unwanted houseguests barge in and make a mess.

They typically live in colonies up to a foot underground, and the social structure surrounds a queen. She is an “egg-laying machine,” Sheridan said. The rest of the ants find food, care for the eggs and generally do their part to keep the colony humming.

When it gets too cold or wet or otherwise unpleasant, the foragers come out to scout for new homes. This scout lays down a pheremone trail that the other ants follow. Sheridan dashed my hopes, saying that wiping out the scout’s pheremone trail won’t prevent the ants from storming your castle. They’ll just send another forager in its stead.

So the ants are in your home looking for another place to set up their home, but they’re also there for food. Sheridan said they like the same foods we do. They like sweets — fruit, candy, plant sugars — but they also will eat fat, protein, other insects. Any morsel that could give them energy, they’ll pick up, even if it falls beyond our idea of food. But again, they come in looking for shelter too, so a tidy kitchen isn’t necessarily going to keep you ant-free.

Sheridan said that home remedies — like cinnamon, baby powder and vinegar-solution — probably work just well enough to keep the wives’ tales alive. They may kill the ants that are in the house but they don’t permanently deal with the colony. Which makes sense, because these colonies are huge.

Mostly what we see here are Argentine ants, which came from South America about a century ago. When two colonies meet up, instead of duking it out for territory, these ants change their ways and they combine colonies. There can be millions of ants with multiple queens. A colony can spread to the size of multiple city blocks. Our climate isn’t harsh enough to kill the ants itself, so they love the area.

Sheridan’s team uses non-repellant chemicals — the kind the ants don’t realize they’re walking through and carrying back to the colony. If an ant can detect a chemical that’s harmful to it, it won’t walk through it and it could get trapped in the house. He suggests killing what’s in the house and then periodically treating the area around the house to create a barrier and get control over the buggers.

He cautioned against improper use of insect sprays, which can poison you if you over-use them or don’t keep the air circulating in the area. Watch for wooziness and flu-like symptoms of chemical poisoning.

Instead of these, which can also leave a film behind where they’re sprayed, Sheridan suggested window spray to kill the line of ants until you can deal with the bigger problem. The cleanup’s a lot easier, too.

In the end, Sheridan said, “We get paid to fight the war, but we’re never going to win.”

Yeah, in the rainy season, we’re all in the fight, brother.

What is Glad You Asked?

Glad You Asked targets the questions that keep crawling around in your mind. So send your questions to me at jdecker@napanews.com or 256-2215 and I’ll follow the trail to find what you’re looking for.