When ants invade your bathroom or kitchen, they crawl over everything in sight. Ants in your home require an exterminator’s help due to the great number of ants in a colony and the great distances that ants may travel to enter your home. Ants have a lifespan of between 45 to 60 days. Ants have very specific jobs within their colonies. These classes include workers, males, queens and some species have soldier ants. Worker ants do jobs like foraging for food, care for offspring, protecting and repairing their nest. Only the queen lays eggs. When ants mate, the males and the queen have wings. The males die off in a day or two. The queen enters her colony, discarding her wings and begins to lay eggs. Despite the queen’s importance to continuing life in the ant colony, she isn’t the boss. Worker ants do jobs according to personal preferences and environmental cues. It is speculated that younger ants work inside and older workers work outside. Ants are social insects who may live underground, above-ground in mounds, in trees and within your home.
Call Suburban Exterminating for help getting rid of ants in your home (631) 864-6900 or (516) 864-6900.
Top 10 Interesting Ant Facts
- Ants can carry 10 to 50 times their body weight.
- Ants have been around since the dinosaurs.
- When the queen dies, the colony also dies.
- Ants hold the record for the fastest movement in the animal kingdom. Check out the statistics for the trap jaw ant.
- Ants can be found on every single continent except Antarctica.
- While an ant does not have lungs or ears, an ant has two stomachs. One stomach holds food for itself and one holds food for other ants.
- Ants have an advanced communication system! They use chemicals for communication and can use taste, physical touch, and sometimes, the vibration of their bodies to send messages about food, enemies, and the nest.
- The largest ant’s nest ever found was over 3,700 miles wide!
- Ants are edible. People say that they taste spicy on account of the formic acid they produce.
- A fungus can infect ants and take control of their bodies. The fungus finds its way underneath the ant’s exoskeleton and begins to consume soft tissue. These infected ants become zombies!
With over 12,000 ant species worldwide, we’re thankful that Long Island is not the home for fire ants or bullet ants. Both ants have painful bites!
