Dealing with those ants in your home

This is a story about a home invasion, but not the kind of crime the News on 6 would usually tell you about. This home invasion is by ants. <br/><br/>Exterminators say they are busier with ants right

Tuesday, May 17th 2005, 9:59 am

By: News On 6

This is a story about a home invasion, but not the kind of crime the News on 6 would usually tell you about. This home invasion is by ants.

Exterminators say they are busier with ants right now than anything else. News on 6 reporter Rick Wells went on an extermination mission with "The Ant Man".

Chris Givens of Mother Natures' Pest Control is the ant man. He's at Steve and Gwen Alley's house 'cause like so many others in Tulsa they've got an ant problem. "There are several different reasons why you have ant problems."

Most of them surround a search for food or water. Most ants live in colonies outside the house so he started looking for a way in. "Looking for cracks and crevices where the ants could be entering, most of them are coming from the base boards looks like." Then it's outside to deal with them at the source. The ant man spreads some bait to try to reduce the population. The ants will carry that stuff back to the nest. Then it's around the house looking for entry points. "What we did is we flushed the hole there, see they are starting to come out." Then he can treat that area to try to build a barrier, but the best thing, he says, would be to seal up those cracks.

Mild winters have left us with more surviving ant colonies than usual, lots of business for exterminators. â€œThere are two types of houses, houses that have ants and houses that are gonna get ants." Well, that's not very promising.

The Ant Man tells the News on 6, the best thing homeowners can do is to treat the yard with a granular insecticide. Once the ants get inside the house, it's time to call the exterminator.