Pavement ants in outdoor office building cafe

One of our commercial accounts, a large office building in Bridgewater, NJ, has a cafe to offer employees breakfast and lunch so they have a location for their meals and don’t have to leave the premises. Recently, during a routine servicing of this property, I was informed by the property manager that their cafe had a large ant infestation. I met with the supervising chef and he showed me the ant trail where ants were accessing the cafe area from a crack in the tile grout. Unfortunately, foraging ants can access buildings through the smallest of gaps, cracks, and spaces in foundation walls and interior slabs. 

I immediately identified the ants as pavement ants, one of the more common nuisance ants that infest buildings. Thee ants are so-named because the queen often forms her colony under sidewalks, building slabs, and large rocks. The underside of these materials provides a dark, moist, hidden area for these ants to build their nests. A common sign of pavement ant activity are sand piles and small soil particles that have accumulated nearby cracks in concrete slavs or at the top of foundation walls where the ants have deposited debris from their excavated nests. Similar piles are seen in the warmer months along sidewalk cracks. 

Pavement ants will forage into buildings in their search for food. They feed on a wide variety of foods, but are especially attracted to the sugars found in nectar, fruits, and syrups and go  absolutely “crazy” over sugar-laden items like spilled soda and ice cream. These ants will also collect and store grease, dead insects, and small seeds for the colony. In short, pavement ants will consume pretty much any morsel of food that they can scavenge. 

Whenever dealing with an ant infestation, I trace the ant trail to determine how and where the insects are accessing the building. Here, the trail route went underneath several appliances. Finally, under one of the refrigerator boxes, I located their main entry point. I observed a huge pile of sand from the foraging ants. I contacted someone of the maintenance staff to show him the areas that needed to be sealed,. He understood the importance of dealing with this immediately given that the infestation was in an area where food was prepared and served. 

To resolve this infestation, I applied a liquid gel bait that the ants would take back to the nest and share with the queen and the rest of the colony. With ant infestations, merely killing foraging ants is not enough. Foraging ants are readily replaceable considering that ant colonies can easily number in the thousands. To successfully resolve an ant infestation, a product must be used that will destroy the queen and the entire hidden nest. Even though we often cannot access the nest  directly, we use the ants’ social behavior in a colony to reach the nest indirectly.