You wake up and you head to the kitchen to get your morning coffee. You don't notice at first but as you get your coffee cup, get your cream from the fridge, and turn around to put them on the counter top you see them everywhere. They are in the sink, they are on the counter top, they are down the baseboard, they are everywhere. You got ants, they have moved in. You spent months and months in the process of finding and ultimately buying a house to move into and these little guys moved in overnight.
What do you do to get rid of them? Well there are a few options, but first you have to understand how they work. I looked on Sciencing.com for a better understanding. The little ants that you see in your kitchen are the worker ants out searching for food. You may see them feeding either on something sugary like maple syrup or a protein like a beef bone you may have given to your dog. The worker ants don't actually eat the food, they carry it back to their nest where it is fed to the larvae and essentially the Queen and the rest of the colony.
To get rid of the ants then is to get rid of the colony. To get rid of the colony the food then must be brought back to the colony that they will eat and (we shall say) eventually put them to sleep for a very long time. To do this you should eliminate all other sources of food for the worker ants to feed on. This includes clearing off the counter tops, wiping down surfaces, and putting out bait stations that the ants will feed on and take back home. Make sure you are not putting repellents out to detract the ants, you don't want to divert their path back to the nest.
Spraying the ants and wiping them away with paper towels from your kitchen will not eliminate them from coming back into your home. No matter how clean you keep your kitchen, the first sign of a reappearing food source to a worker ant, and they are all back. So take the time to set bait traps and let them work as the ants take the bait and bring back to their nest. Just as the home-buying process took time and may even been really frustrating, especially in the East Bay area, it is the same with dealing with ants. Trust the process and watch as these little guys disappear from your counter, kitchen and home.
You can order these pesticide free bait traps on Amazon here