Are There Some Benefits to Ants?

You may be wondering, what is the purpose for ants? Well, there isn’t much benefit to having ants in your home at all. But, there are a few benefits of ants to the world as a whole that you may not know.

Benefits of Ants in the Garden: Help Maintain Soil Health

Ants are similar to earth worms in the fact that they help to aerate the soil. What does aeration do and how does it help with soil health? Proper soil maintenance of watering, mowing, and fertilizing are great. However, if none of the water and nutrients reach your trees or plants it isn’t very beneficial.

Aeration of the soil will help nutrients reach deeper down into the soil. This allows more of what plants need to flourish to get to the roots. Ants help with this by tunneling around your yard. As water and nutrients enter the soil, these tunnels can help distribute them more effectively.

Your lawn could be a good candidate for aeration if you have pets, or if there is a lot of traffic through it. This will cause your soil to become compacted and make it harder for nutrients and water to get through. Again, ants can help with this by creating tunnels to avoid damage this could cause.

Benefits of Ants: They Transport Seeds and Help Plants Reproduce

If you’re wondering how else are ants beneficial, another interesting thing they do is transport seeds from plants around to new locations. As a food source ants like nuts, seeds, fruits, etc. When they find food, they tend to bring it to the nest so the colony can feed on it. They also help with decompression of food and animals that may have ended up in your yard, so they can help maintain a healthy garden as well.

Ants can sometimes travel large distances and depending on where they get the food source, they may even introduce brand new species of plants to an area. As stated above, the areas ants inhabit usually have a larger chance of having higher quality soil, so the likelihood of the seeds and plants sprouting and growing to be healthy are higher as well.

Ants may help with some minimal prevention of other pests

Inside your home ants are usually just looking for food and a place to stay for the winter, however they can some times assist with some pest control outside of the home. Ants have been known to, on occasion, eat the eggs and larva of some common household pests like spiders, fleas, flies, bedbugs and sometimes even cockroaches.

Obviously since ants are usually viewed as pests in and around your home, they aren’t the best form of pest control, but they do help out in their own ways to help keep some other pests in check.

Keep Ants in the Garden, Not in Your Home

Ants play an important role in nature, but when they invade your home or yard, they can become a big problem. While ants benefit the garden, too many can damage plants, attract other pests, and even get inside your house. If you’re dealing with an ant infestation, Rove Pest Control can help! Our experts will remove ants and keep them from coming back. Don’t let ants take over—call or contact us online today for fast, effective ant control, and enjoy a pest-free home!