Ant Control in Burlingame, CA

Local Context

One Argentine Ant Population Runs Under Burlingame Gardens, Not Fifty Rival Nests

Argentine ants are the reason ant control here is a baiting problem and not a spraying problem. Workers from different nests along the same Burlingame street do not fight each other. They cooperate, sharing queens and brood across what functions as one population stretching yard to yard. Kill the foragers on your counter and the nest replaces them in days from a satellite under the sidewalk slab next door. Slow-acting bait works because the workers carry it home before it takes effect.

The water cycle sets the two invasion seasons. Roughly twenty inches of rain arrives between November and March, and the first storms that saturate ground along Mills Creek, Easton Creek and Terrace Creek flood shallow nests and push them into the nearest dry structure. Then it reverses. By late summer the soil has dried and the same colonies move indoors chasing moisture — dishwasher pans, sink traps, the condensate line at an air handler. Both waves start outside.

Construction decides where they get in. The pre-1940 raised-foundation houses in the Easton Addition give ants a covered path from soil to sill plate through crawl-space vents and pipe penetrations, and the mature landscaping on Burlingame Park lots often puts irrigated soil right against a stem wall. On the newer slab construction along El Camino Real the route is the slab edge and the plumbing penetration instead. Where a downspout has kept a wall wet or a deck ledger has stayed damp, carpenter ants (Camponotus) move into the softened wood — a different problem that requires finding the nest itself.