Many people get annoyed to see ants inside homes and consider these harmful because these crawling insects can reach every possible spot, from the kitchen to the bathroom.
How Are Ants Harmful to Humans? Ants are harmful to humans as their bites and stings are painful and contaminate food leading to food-borne diseases. Moreover, they can cause damage to property, wooden furniture, and electric appliances or outlets. A heavy infestation of nuisance pests can compromise the aesthetic appeal of your house and pose a danger to pets. Furthermore, they can cause infections, attract more pests, and cause damage to plants and crops.
Ants are usually helpful creatures that positively impact the environment, but they become nuisance pests inside the home.
Painful bites and stings
Every species of ants has varying stinging abilities depending on the size of their stinger and the poison in their glands.
The poison can cause undesired allergic reactions, itching, and severe infections. A few are deadly and poisonous, like bullet and velvet ants, leading to a burning sensation on the skin.
It becomes challenging to tolerate extreme pain as it feels like a bullet piercing through skin tissues.
Moreover, fire ants can grab the skin tissues with their strong mandibles and try to break the skin’s protective layer to inject the poison.
However, carpenter and argentine ants are not dangerous and do not cause a painful sensation on the body, but they can cause slight irritation in the affected area.
Contamination of food
Ants keep crawling within the garbage can to consume nutrients from the discarded pieces of fruits and vegetables that are useless to humans.
The rotting fruits are heavily loaded with bacteria and many other germs that can get transferred to food on the kitchen countertop when these insects crawl inside in search of food.
They carry toxic microorganisms on their bodies and shift them inside the home when they move through towels, dirty dishes, laundry clothes, and uncovered food in the kitchen.
The sugar and pharaoh ants keep moving from outdoor to indoor areas. So, they can be responsible for making you ill by biting and transferring their gut bacteria into the body.
Cause property damage
Ants are not only harmful to humans, but they can cause damage to properties and destroy their foundations by building nests under the ground.
They can weaken the house’s base by digging deep into the soil, leading to the fall of huge buildings.
These tiny creatures have strong teeth that can help chew through hard surfaces like concrete, but they take several years to cause noticeable damage to the building.
In addition, they can even enter concrete surfaces and build their nests under the slab in the driveway or sidewalks.
They can chew solid window caulks or rubber of electrical wires to make their way inside the house, leading to expensive repairs.
Heavy infestation of nuisance pests
It seems frustrating to have annoying pests inside the home that are crawling in every corner of the house. They can get inside through tiny cracks close to the windows or plumbing lines.
The presence of sweet candies on the dining table and juice spills on the ground are detected by their smell receptors and make them come inside.
Almost everything inside the house seems attractive to them, from the wet floor of the bathroom, and dirty laundry room, to the kitchen sink filled with dirty dishes.
The presence of hair and the sweet smell of towels can capture these insects’ attention and allow them to reach towels, resulting in biting your face and other body parts.
Furthermore, they can come back even if you sweep them out of the house until you make your house unattractive to them.
Damage wooden furniture
Carpenter ants like to build their house inside rotting wooden logs that are slightly damp, making it easy for these chewing pests to make tunnels.
They prefer to attack wooden structures, like sofa or bed frames, consoles, and windows, to make a house for the colony and are not interested in eating the wooden shavings.
In addition, chewed pieces of wood are thrown close to the colony in the form of sawdust and affect the structural stability of the wooden furniture.
Exposure to insecticides
Many people prefer to use insecticides to get rid of the infestations permanently because natural ingredients like a cinnamon stick can only repel them from coming inside the house.
Professional exterminators remove ant colonies by spraying harmful chemicals on their mounds that are not only effective at killing these pests but are also dangerous for humans.
Accordingly, they can only be controlled with the spray of toxic chemicals in insecticides.
Attract more pests
Ants control the population of garden pests that can destroy the lawn grass or plants. However, they can attract more pests inside the home that are interested in eating these insects.
Beetles, flies, spiders, and caterpillars like to eat ants navigating in the garden as their tiny bodies are full of proteins. In addition, termites also get attracted to these insects to kill them.
Moreover, antlion larvae and phorid fly like to eat fire ants and come into the house by following the smell of these creatures.
So, these insects can create a significant problem by attracting these destructive pests inside the house, posing a safety risk as these insects can harm humans living there.
Pose a danger to pets
They can be dangerous for pets as they get attracted to pet food and water bowl in their house. In addition, the fire ants usually climb on their bodies and sting them, leading to painful sensations.
You have to keep them away from pet dogs or cats as these tiny insects can lead to their death by initiating a series of anaphylactic reactions after stinging.
They can make your rabbits, birds, and dogs exhausted due to severe pain, and you have to take them to the vet clinic for treatment to save their life.
Damage plants and crops
Some harmful species of these insects, like argentine, big-headed, browsing, and crazy ants, can cause significant damage to crops in the garden and are known as environmental pests.
They are commonly found in the plant’s roots due to moist environments and suck nutrients from plant roots and sap from the stem region.
However, they disturb the roots of plants affecting the transport of water and nutrients to leaves. It can lead to the death of plants because they cannot survive without efficient water transport.
They prefer to build nests in potted plants due to the humid environment and food availability. So, they are also harmful to you because they affect your food source and crop plants.
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