Swarm Weather : Exterminators Doing Banner Business Making Ants Cry Uncle

Ventura County is at war.

Invading armies stream forth from underground encampments in long, black lines a thousand soldiers strong.

They send scout parties ahead, probing for weaknesses in seemingly impregnable walls.

Suddenly, they are everywhere, storming through the bushes, climbing the trees, barging into our very homes. They penetrate our defenses, plunder our supplies.

We hit the invaders back with everything we’ve got. We bomb them, spray them with deadly ammunition, crush the stragglers beneath our heels, and all they do is eat their dead for strength, regroup and attack again. They are relentless. Unstoppable.

This is no exaggeration. It’s ant season in Ventura County.

Hot weather and dry ground are driving ants from their subterranean colonies into homes from Simi Valley to Ojai in search of moisture, cool air and food.

In Moorpark, they swarmed over a breakfast laid out by a young couple in their new home, invading the toaster and blackening the jelly jar with their numbers.

In Camarillo, they infested a woman’s kitchen and sent her to the phone at 10:30 p.m. in a panic to summon exterminators after hours.

In Thousand Oaks, columns of marching ants ran so thick beside a swimming pool that some fell, lemming-like, to their death by drowning.

People like Chuck Reeves who own pristine, well-kept homes still have to call in an exterminator every two months just to keep ants and other pests such as fleas at bay.

“Nobody likes to have insects crawling on their eating utensils, in their food, laying their eggs--who knows what they’re doing?” Reeves said.

He savored the pungent tang of Dursban 50 rising from his freshly pesticide-sprayed lawn in Thousand Oaks. “You can still smell it,” he said with a confident smile.

Ant complaints are making up half of the nearly 100 calls a week this summer to Terminix, said Richard Cooper of the company’s Ventura County office. The problem is most severe in Simi Valley and the Conejo Valley, where the weather is hotter and the earth drier than in the west county.

In the summer, the company gets nearly 10 times as many ant complaints as in winter, and the customers are most insistent, he said.

“It’s funny, they’re not in a panic, but they want it NOW,” he said.

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While ants are not disease-carriers likes rats and roaches and don’t devour homes as termites do, Cooper said, “the urgency is always there” in customers’ voices.

“They do get into your food, they can ruin food. And most people psychologically will not eat food if there are ants in it,” he said.

Exterminator Peter Bernhardt makes more than a dozen calls a day for Hydrex Pest Control Co. to spray for pests--mostly ants--at houses he visited just two months earlier.

Customers “think we can solve the problem, but it’s only controlling the problem,” Bernhardt said. He donned a mask and rubber gloves, and unreeled a yellow hose from his truck to pump pesticide all over the foundation, walkways and lawns of a Thousand Oaks house. “You can try to keep them off your property, but it’s hard.”

That’s because ants are the most populous, voracious and persistent pests at work in Ventura County.

Ventura County’s most common ant breed is the Argentine ant, which spread throughout South, Central and North America long ago and made itself at home in Southern California.

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But other breeds scuttle and scurry here too.

Pavement ants, odorous ants and thief ants hunt across linoleum and browse through wooden cupboards for grains of sugar, particles of flour, drops of water.

They launch their invasions from colonies centered around a single queen that can live for up to 20 years.

They crawl in through electrical outlets, drainpipes, hairline cracks in the concrete slab under your home.

Almost blind, they sniff their way in long lines, along paths scented with pheromones by ants that have already scouted out sources of food and water.

They are also partial to night-blooming jasmine, and to mites that feed on rose bushes.

And unless you kill the colony, experts say, they will keep coming back.

Sometimes a new queen may be born into an existing colony, only to be shoved out by the dominant queen, Bernhardt said.

“She’s kicked out of the colony, and she’ll start her own colony,” he marveled. “She’ll take her soldiers, they’ll start feeding her. They’ll start with a couple hundred, and before you know it, she’s back in business.”

There is more than one way to kill an ant.

Spraying Windex on them does it quick and dirty. The ammonia swiftly kills the ant, and the bodies can be wiped up so survivors do not eat the dead.

Then, exterminators say, laying down commonly available baited traps is the best method. The ants will reappear and feed in the trap, carry the food back to their nest and feed the poison to the queen--and then die there, poisoning other ants that eat the dead.

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Raid and other pesticides will also kill ants and provide a barrier they will not cross. But they may find another way in, the pesticide will eventually wear off, and the ants will return.

What’s more, baits laid down on top of pesticides will have no effect because the ants will never approach them to feed while the poison barrier is there.

Even professional pesticides provide only limited protection-- they dissolve in rain or sprinkler water over a period of about two months, and must be resprayed throughout the hotter months, exterminators say.

“I’ll shoot all these houses [on Friday],” said Bernhardt, “and by Monday, I’ll guarantee four or five of them [customers] will call because they have ants in the interior now.

“People don’t give an ant credit, being as dumb as it is,” he added. “But if it wants to get there, it’ll get there.”