Help with ants in the shower!

Ants are often attracted to water. So trying to solve the moisture issue may help.

But if you want to get rid of ants, you will want to purchase some ant bait. Ant bait is a slow-acting poison that they will take back to their nest and with any luck it will kill the queen and colony.

That being said, if there are only a few ants and you’re not getting a good look at them, they may not be ants. A while back we were having a problem with what we thought were an odd species of ants and they turned out to be termites.

And if you want to get rid of bugs in general, you can always hire an exterminator. It sounds like it would be worth it for you.

I'm guessing given your distaste for looking at them you don't have a closer up photo of the ants? Being able to identify the species might help. For example if they are carpenter ants you may have wood damage in the bathroom that they are inhabiting. Carpenter ants don't "eat wood" like termites, but they will use rotten wood to build nests in. The poor ventilation would contribute to the likelihood of this. Is there an exhaust fan or something?

Just to clarify - the above isn't saying you definitely have wood damage OR carpenter ants, just an avenue of investigation. Many ant species can forage quite far from the nest so they may not even be nesting near/in your home.

Knowing the species of ants you are dealing with can be quite helpful - there are different common ant species that invade homes, and the optimal strategy for dealing with them can be different.

I can tell you what works extremely reliably here in coastal Southern California where we have a supercolony of invasive Argentine ants that covers huge portion of the state and loves to nest in urban areas and invade homes - both to seek water and food sources.

Step 1 is to maintain an external chemical perimeter barrier around the home. There are a few options for this, and professionals have access to more potent chemicals, but I find the Ortho Home Defense spray to be very effective - it's inexpensive at Home Depot, and I spray the outside of the house along the concrete wall footings, basically along any hard house surface that is close to outside dirt surrounding the house. You don't need to cover a wide area, just 1-2 inches wide along the entire house wherever possible. Ants will not cross this barrier once applied, and one application usually lasts through at least one ant season - 6-12 months. This really reduces the amount of scout ants that enter your house looking for water or food, and then invite the whole nest over.

Step 2 is if you do get a line of ants in the home - like you have in your bathroom. First I always attempt to locate where on the outside is the line of ants getting into the home. 90% of the time, I can find a place somewhere along the outside perimeter where the ants are coming in - in which case I return to Step 1 and re-apply the barrier in that area (note this will trap lots of ants inside the home, and they will search for an alternate exit, so the next part is still important) Regardless of whether I can or can not find the entrance point, I then use the Optigard Ant Gel Bait - of all the options I tried, this one has worked the best for me. I put a small amount of the gel (like pea size amount) on a disposable piece of plastic near where the ants are, or near any place I can see them entering a room or bathroom. Once ants discover it, they start feeding on it, and eventually laying a pheromone trail to it for other ants to follow. Within 15-30 minutes, you might see a huge increase in new ants as they come to feed on the gel - they will fill their body with it, and then carry it back to their nest to feed their queen. If you don't like ants, this part can be gross, but is extremely important - leave them alone for this part. The gel eventually kills the ants that feed on it, but the effect is delayed, allowing them enough time to carry it back to their nest and spread through the colony. Almost always, I see no more ants coming to the bait within 12-24 hours. The gel will also usually kill any ants you might have trapped inside the house by applying Ortho where they were getting in. Also the poisoned ants will often seek water before dying, so you might find lots of dead ants in your bathtub after the successful use of the bait gel.

I bought a package of 4 tubes of the gel 9 years ago, and have only used 2 of the tubes in the 9 years so far - a little goes a really long way.

Argentine ants are a supercolony and share queens, so old nests will eventually be repopulated from neighboring queens - so they will eventually be back. If I am diligent with Step 1 above, I only have to perform Step 2 maybe 2-3 times a year though (and usually it's because when I work in the yard, I often carry ants on me when coming back into the house, which defeats the barrier - they are able to find a way out, as the barrier is never 100% effective) 2-3 times a year might seem like a lot, but I live in a fairly large suburban home surrounded by landscaping that is absolutely filled with Argentine ants - they are absolutely everywhere here, and unlike some of my neighbors, I don't like large scale chemical treatment and poisoning my whole yard - so I consider the targeted treatment with a barrier + spot treating breaches with bait gel to be a good compromise.

We had this exact problem recently and have a shower door very similar to yours. There was a small gap in the caulk around the lower part of the door track near the shower pan. Water was collecting under the track and likely attracting the ants. We stopped using the shower for a few days to ensure it was dry and then sealed the hole with silicone caulk. I never figured out where the ants were actually coming from, but once the shower was sealed, there have been no more ants in our bathroom.

I've had the "persistent ant invasion" thing myself and I know how weirdly cumulative the psychological impact of their persistence is. Hang in there.

In my case they were coming in by (and into) my bed (I never ate in bed or took any food into my bedroom, they just had some kind of ingress in the wall there and wanted to be inside.)

Not sure how applicable this is since your entry point is the shower, but in addition to ant baits, an all-natural solution for immediately changing their behavior/cutting off their trails turned out to be cinnamon. They can't stand the stuff at all; it doesn't kill them, but they will avoid it like the plague, so sprinkling it at entry points or key chokepoints along their scent trails will get them to immediately reroute. They will always refuse to step foot on cinnamon.

Frankly, I've always had success with basic ant bait, the kind that are a poisoned food source which the ants take back to their colony and poison the queen, etc. This product is relatively inexpensive at hardware stores, Walmart, etc. Brand never mattered in my cases. Just got whatever seemed reasonably priced.

Oh that’s no fun at all.

Are you seeing any sort of clear trail from the ants or just seeing them about?

At one of my old apartments (that had both an ant and termite problem) one day we saw a literal line of ants going from a window across a wall and over to the trashcan. We ended up using windex and a sanitizer spray on the wall to clear up the trail & remove the scent trail, and then put down terro on the windowsill. The first time I think my roommate just wiped the ants away, but didn’t get rid of the trail so they came back in full force the next day, but the windex and Lysol did the trick (and reminding my roommates to takes the trash out if they put food in it). Unfortunately, if you don’t know where they’re coming from, I’m not sure that’s too much help.

A solution that always works for us is a mix of borax, honey and a little water. Mix well and soak cotton balls in it. Put some of the treated cotton balls near the ant trail and that's it. They'll take the borax home with them and kill the whole colony. Same principle as ant bait. Usually works pretty quickly.

Related to above: there's no window I can open, and the room is quite small and narrow. So, humidity builds up FAST and I don't really have an effective way to vent it out or anything.

I don't have a ton of advice for most of your questions but this specific issue can be solved with a box fan to mingle the air with whatever larger room is adjacent.

I pay for routine pest service with the mindset of it being "insurance" for pest issues. A local company charges $115 every 3 months, after they spray the perimeter and do a couple other preventative things while checking for signs of pests.

Since then, we've only had one issue with ants. When we did, we called them out, they showed up same day, and put out some bait and used an additional spray. Pest control companies have access to a higher grade of products than the general public, and in this case it truly did seem to work very quickly.

(Prior to starting service with them, we had at least 3 ant issues and a couple other bug issues, all within the same 12ish months.)

Note, about the below: the gel can help you find their entry points, even if you'd rather find more immediate temporary fixes / things to kill them. Since the gel attracts them, if you watch them long enough you can see where they're getting in because the trail is more obvious when lots of them are crawling, they'll often crawl in, take the gel, and you can even watch them leave from the exact same place they're getting in- so think of the gel as more than just a more long-term/seasonal fix, and as a way to maybe help you do other things to prevent (check where they're getting in via the gel and, once they're gone, seal that spot up).

However, I think ultimately trying to permanently prevent them might be a tough battle unless you're ready to seal up every small crevice you can find anywhere. Those things are quite smart at finding a way in, via the smallest possible place. Mine come in through the walls. They find just enough of a gap from outside and then I'll see them crawling in between the edge of the wall and ceiling, and so on. And you can seal up a ton of spots, and quickly find that they've found some other angle to get back in. I think the most effective things honestly are just dealing with them every year, just with the most efficient process you can find.

For temporary killing/chasing, I've found that like, citrus-based cleaners/sprays seem to work well and sometimes even repel them for a short time, but it's always extremely temporary. Can also use insecticide sprays made for indoors as long as you let them dry, but even these don't seem to last super long.

IMO the best way is to take out the colony. A couple of rounds of Tarro gel works wonders for me, always eventually takes the colony out, just requires some patience of letting them grab the gel and leave instead of attacking the ants during the process.

I understand that this process in a shower is way more annoying, of course. Though, if you can attract ants elsewhere with the gel, it could actually attract the ones getting in the shower over to it instead. Hard to tell, but for me, I used the gel to take care of ants in the kitchen, and now the ants that were in my shower/bathroom are gone too, just as a side-effect of the colony being taken out.

After my second time sitting the gel out this season, no more ants at all, and you don't have to bother with using their cardboard tabs or whatever, you can always just tear a piece off of a sheet of paper or a cardboard box, or whatever you want. Heck, not that I'd recommend it, but I've actually let a small amount drip down a kitchen wall, because it was close to where they were traveling, and that worked too, haha.

I've dealt with a major ant infestation to the level of nightmares and horror movie material. My war was against odorous house ants (also often called sugar ants or moisture ants).

I'll let you look them up if you want details but the notable things are: They're usually pretty dark, almost if not black. Maybe 3mm long at most but they can vary in size. When crushed, they release a somewhat sweet and rancid coconut scent. They love moisture and sugar. Something to note is their nests often have multiple queens and the workers can migrate in and out of other nests. So basically, every nest can be considered a satellite nest of another colony. Which means if you destroy a nest, they'll likely return in a few months and definitely next year.

I wish you luck.