Most people picture ants as a summer nuisance that disappears once the weather turns. Pharaoh ants don’t play by those rules. These pale yellow-brown ants, barely 2mm long, thrive specifically in heated buildings all year round — which is exactly why October, as central heating gets switched back on across Nottingham, tends to bring a fresh wave of sightings.
We’re seeing this most in two very different but equally vulnerable types of property: converted flats and multi-occupancy buildings in Nottingham city centre, and the ex-colliery terraces and flat conversions around Kirkby-in-Ashfield and Sutton-in-Ashfield.
Why Pharaoh ants are a different problem to garden ants
The black garden ants most homeowners are familiar with nest outdoors and only wander in looking for food, usually dying back or disappearing as it gets colder. Pharaoh ants are a different species altogether. Originally tropical, they can only survive outdoors in the UK during a warm summer — everywhere else, they live permanently indoors, nesting deep inside wall cavities, behind skirting boards, under floors, and especially around pipework, boiler cupboards and electrical sockets where there’s constant low-level warmth.
That’s what makes centrally-heated, multi-unit buildings such an ideal home for them. A colony can have dozens of queens and will split into “budding” satellite nests if disturbed, spreading along shared service ducts, cavity walls and pipe runs between flats. What looks like an isolated problem in one kitchen is very often part of a much larger colony running through the whole building.
Why Nottingham city centre is a hotspot
The dense flat conversions around the Lace Market, Hockley and the blocks around the Victoria Centre — many of them older buildings split into multiple units with shared heating risers and party cavity walls — are exactly the layout Pharaoh ants exploit. Commercial kitchens and food premises in the same areas are especially at risk, since Pharaoh ants are drawn to anything sugary, greasy or protein-rich and will trail directly to food prep surfaces, bins and dishwashers. For a licensed food business, an infestation isn’t just a nuisance, it’s a hygiene rating risk.
Why Kirkby-in-Ashfield and Sutton-in-Ashfield see it too
It’s not just city centre flats. Many of the ex-colliery terraces around Kirkby-in-Ashfield and Sutton-in-Ashfield were built close together with shared party walls, and a good number have since been converted into flats or HMOs with modern combi boilers and warm loft conversions. That combination of old brickwork cavities and new, consistent heat sources gives Pharaoh ants the same conditions they’d find in a city centre block, just with a different housing stock around them.
Why DIY treatment usually makes it worse
This is the one pest where the instinctive response — reaching for a can of ant spray or supermarket bait — is almost always counterproductive. Surface sprays kill the ants you can see, but they alert the colony to a threat, triggering queens to split off and bud new satellite nests elsewhere in the building rather than dying out. We’ve been called in more than once to a flat where a well-meaning spray treatment turned a single-room problem into ants appearing in three neighbouring units a few weeks later.
Effective treatment relies on slow-acting gel baits that worker ants carry back to the nest and feed to the queens and larvae, collapsing the colony from the inside over several weeks rather than scattering it. In a shared building, this also needs coordinating across multiple flats or units at once — treating one kitchen while the colony carries on next door just means the ants come back.
What to do if you’re seeing them
If you’re spotting tiny pale ants trailing along skirting boards, around sockets, or near a boiler cupboard in a flat in Nottingham city centre, Kirkby-in-Ashfield or Sutton-in-Ashfield, it’s worth getting a professional identification early rather than reaching for a spray. If you’re in a shared or multi-occupancy building, it’s also worth mentioning it to your landlord, managing agent or neighbours, since a coordinated treatment across the building is usually what actually clears it for good.
NestBusters covers the whole of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, including both Nottingham city centre and the Ashfield area, with gel baiting treatments designed specifically for Pharaoh ant colonies in heated, multi-unit buildings. Call us on 0742 984 9483 or visit nottinghampest.co.uk to book an inspection.
