Treatment
by scenario.
The general playbook tells you the sequence. These pages tell you what that sequence looks like on the four calls that make up most ant work, including the specific mistakes each one invites.
Indoor Kitchen Trails
A visible indoor trail is a foraging line, not a nest. The colony is almost always outside the room and frequently outside the building. Treat the trail as free intelligence: it tells you the food preference, the entry point, and the direction of the nest. Spraying it destroys all three.
Structural and Carpenter Ant Damage
Carpenter ants do not eat wood, they excavate it, and they overwhelmingly excavate wood that is already wet or has been wet. Every carpenter ant job is a moisture investigation first and an insecticide question second. Treat the water and the parent nest, or you will be back next spring.
Fire Ant Mounds in Turf
Broadcast bait first, then treat the mounds that matter. The two-step method exists because individual mound drenches never touch the unmounded colonies and newly mated queens that are already in the soil around them. Treating one mound at a time on an acre is the most common way to spend a season losing.
Perimeter and Exterior Pressure
The perimeter is where ant programs are actually won. Almost every recurring indoor complaint is an exterior colony with a convenient bridge. The work is habitat correction, exclusion, and targeted exterior baiting, in that order, with residual chemistry as the smallest part of the plan.