How to Get Rid of Ants in Central Texas

Fire ants build the mounds you recognize in yards, pastures, and bare dirt. They are aggressive, sting repeatedly, and the mounds can be anywhere from golf-ball size to a foot or more across after several seasons. Their stings cause a characteristic burning sensation followed by a white pustule at the sting site.

Carpenter ants are large (a quarter to half an inch), typically black or reddish-black, and they excavate wood to nest in it. They do not eat wood the way termites do, but they hollow it out, and the damage accumulates. You often find them in wood that has been softened by moisture: a window sill with a slow leak, a deck board that stays damp, framing near a roof penetration. Finding large black ants inside, especially near windows or at ceiling level, is a common first indicator.

Rover ants and odorous house ants are small (about 1/16 inch), trail in lines, and get into kitchens looking for sugary foods or moisture. Odorous house ants release a blue-cheese or rotten-coconut smell when crushed. These are nuisance ants with colonies that can be enormous and multi-queened, making them hard to eliminate without the right approach.

For individual mounds, a liquid drench applied to the mound and the surrounding soil is the fastest knockdown. The goal is to contact and kill the queen, so the application must penetrate the mound rather than just treat the surface. Apply in the morning or evening when ants are active near the surface.

Broadcast fire ant bait covers the whole yard and is the most effective long-term approach. Worker ants pick up bait granules and carry them back to the colony as food, where the active ingredient (often a slow-acting insect growth regulator) eliminates the colony. Bait requires patience: it is not an instant knockdown. Apply when ants are actively foraging and the soil is dry. Wet soil causes ants to stay underground and ignore surface bait.

The real fix for carpenter ants is finding and eliminating the moisture source that made the wood attractive for nesting. No treatment holds if the wet wood is still there. Fix the leak, replace the damaged wood, ensure gutters drain away from the structure, and improve ventilation in any persistently damp area.

Once the moisture problem is addressed, treat the nesting galleries with a dust or foam product that penetrates the void. Perimeter treatments that create a barrier at the foundation reduce foraging workers coming in from exterior colonies, which is often where a carpenter ant problem starts.

For small ants trailing inside (rover ants, odorous house ants, Argentine ants), bait gel is significantly more effective than spray. The foraging workers pick up bait and take it back to the colony, where it kills the queen and other reproductives. Spraying the trail kills the workers you can see but does not reach the colony, and it can split the colony into multiple sub-groups, making the problem larger.

Place bait along the trails, near the entry points (gaps around plumbing, at window sills, under door thresholds), and near the food or moisture that is attracting them. Do not spray anything near the bait: insecticide contamination causes ants to avoid it. Clean up the food and moisture source alongside bait placement so there is nothing competing with the bait's attractant.

At ACI Pest & Lawn, our general pest program covers the ant species most common around the Highland Lakes on a regular schedule, and we use bait placement inside where needed rather than relying only on exterior spray.