How to Get Rid of Ants Outside – How to Kill Ants Outside

If you’ve managed to get rid of the ants in your home, getting rid of ants outside is the next logical step to prevent ants from harassing your family or destroying your yard. How to get rid of ants in your yard is a more complicated question than getting rid of ants inside, however, as your lawn is the ants’ natural turf.

In this article, we’ll provide you with a few ways to get rid of ants outside your home so that you can guarantee that they won’t return or cause damage. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll have a few tactics for ant control that you can put into action immediately.

How To Get Rid Of Ants Outside

Getting rid of ants outside requires a multi-pronged strategy. It isn’t enough to use any single tactic because of how resilient ants are to adversity when they are in their natural environment.

Thus, when you read through the following tactics, keep an eye out for opportunities to combine them for superior efficacy.

Wet The Turf

The easiest thing you can do to kill ants in your yard is to keep the turf of your lawn very wet or somewhat muddy. Muddy gardens are perfectly fine for grasses and many plants, but muddy terrain is challenging for ants to navigate.

Similarly, when the ground is wet, the pheromone trails which ants rely on to signal to other ants regarding food are heavily disrupted.

When the pheromones are secreted onto wet surfaces, other ants can’t smell them as effectively, so the colony as a whole ends up having less inflow of food.

Wet turf is also less hospitable for ants to build their hills, and flooded hills may kill the ants within before they can escape. Thus, while wetting the turf isn’t the only way for how to get rid of ants outside, it is a low-cost option that you should consider carefully.

Apply Pesticides

Applying anti-ant pesticide pellets or sprays to your lawn is a surefire way to keep ants suppressed. While not all pesticide sprays or pellets will be capable of killing ants outright, they will make it so that ants can’t trespass through certain areas without becoming poisoned.

Anti-ant pesticides are also effective at killing other yard pests. How to get rid of ants in the yard is thus a problem that you can tackle alongside other pest issues in your yard if you use the right poison spray or pellets.

It’s important to remember that applying pesticides to your yard will not kill ants that are currently inside of their nests so long as the pesticide is not a poisoned bait product intended explicitly for ants to transport into their nest and feed to their comrades.

This means that the best way for how to get rid of ants in the yard is to use a pesticide pellet which has a baited component which will not kill ants instantly.

Seed Predators

Predators ranging from bats to sparrows to spiders are active at thinning the number of ants and killing queens, which migrate to form new colonies in the spring. While you may not want to encourage spiders to live in your yard, if you dislike ants, bats are a viable and ecologically friendly option.

To encourage bats to roost nearby your most significant ant problem areas, create shelters for them and place small pieces of sweet fruit.

If you are in an area where anteaters naturally reside, trying to attract a few of the long-nosed creatures is also a viable way to control your ant population.