Thief, pharaoh and pavement ants are also commonly found indoors and often nest in wall voids where locating the nest can be extremely difficult without the help of a trained expert. In order to eliminate an ant infestation it is important to find and eliminate the nest since the ants found in the open are only the workers and the queen will continue to produce more ants until the nest is eliminated. Another complication many homeowners encounter when attempting to address ant infestations is that when you are only killing the worker ants you can “stress” the ant colony and inadvertently cause a bigger pest control problem. When an ant colony loses too many of its workers the colony enters what’s known as a stress state, where it produces additional queens and divides into two or three separate colonies in its attempt to survive. The end result is that you will see few to no ants for a while, and once the new colonies have re-established you can end up with an even worse ant problem than you started with.