Does your home need interior or exterior pest control services? If you're trying to manage a summer-time ant invasion, take a look at what you need to know about pest control inside and outside of your home.
What Are Interior Pest Services?
As the name implies, this type of service includes sprays, dusts, traps, baits, and other extermination materials that are inside your home. The specific type of control method used will depend on the pest, your household's needs, and the professional's recommendations. If you have children or pets, talk to the pest pro about low toxicity or safer materials to use.
What Are Exterior Pest Services?
Also like the name says, these services include outside or exterior control method applications. Exterior pest services may also rely on the use of sprays, dusts, or baits and traps. But the type of materials used (the ingredients in each method) may differ from interior products.
Even though exterior pest products are outside of your home, you will still need to take caution if your children, other people, or pets will walk, play, or in any way go near the application area. A pest professional can also help to choose lower-toxicity exterior products and will discuss wait times before you allow people or pets to walk on or near the application sites.
Which Option Is Better for Ant Extermination—Interior or Exterior Control?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Some homes may only need interior methods, others could benefit from exterior methods, and many may need a combination of both.
According to the National Pest Management Association's PestWorld website, ants are the top nuisance pest in U.S. households. With over 700 species in America, it's not always easy to find the just-right control method. This makes it important to contact a professional contractor instead of trying to tackle an ant invasion alone.
Before the pest contractor chooses an interior, exterior, or combination method, they will need to inspect your home and find the source of the ants. After locating the nest, they can treat the colony or the areas where the ants forage. This could include spraying or dusting along interior baseboards, under cabinets, behind outlets, in crawl spaces, inside walls, in the attic, in the basement, behind plumbing, or in other potentially infested spaces.
Interior methods will either kill the ants on contact or lure them to a bait that they will bring back to the nest. Exterior methods can also kill ants on contact. But these methods also may focus on keeping the pests away from your home. Think of exterior ant control as an invisible barrier. This provides another layer of prevention that can potentially stop a future re-infestation.