So the ants came into your house inside the peach pits?

I don't know how you stop the ants from coming inside if they are invisible to the naked eye when you bring in the peaches because they're inside the peaches. I've never had that happen. I assume they are entering at the stem end of the fruit? Maybe soak the peaches in a bucket of water before bringing them indoors to see if that flushes out the ants. I don't know if it will.

You also could try to trap the ants somehow----maybe by putting the peaches inside a bowl with a snap-on lid or inside a zip-lock bag. It won't do anything to remove the ants from the peaches, but it would keep them from climbing out of the peaches and roaming all around the kitchen.

You could put boric acid ant traps out near the fruit.

Thanks Dawn. I was hoping, you had a "GREAT" idea. I think I will have to start cutting the peaches open outside... and for now have discontinued bringing any in to ripen in the bowl on the counter.

Moni

You're welcome Moni. I don't think I had any great ideas in this case but I hope I at least had a couple of mediocre ones. Anything I could think of that might prevent ants likely wasn't something you could do with fruit without harming the fruit.

When ants are traveling a little pathway and/or trying to make their way indoors, I mess up their ability to follow the path by spraying the ground (or the porch or the side of the house or whatever) where their trail is with peppermint soap. I use Dr. Bronner's liquid soap, diluted at the rate of a teaspoon of soap in a quart of water. The peppermint scent prevents the ants from following a chemical scent trail left for them by other ants. It lasts for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, gradually even wearing away or washing away. I am careful to not spray it on any plants because soap can become a herbicide in our heat. (I don't mind spraying it on bermuda grass because you can't kill that grass with a little soap spray.) However, I wouldn't spray peppermint soap on a living plant in these temperatures or even on fruit. If you have ants traveling up the tree to get to the fruit, you could try spraying the ground around it with peppermint soap. Or, you could coat the tree trunk down close to the ground with a band of Tree Tangle Foot in which they'd become entangled. That should keep additional ants from climbing the tree. However, if the tree is full of ants, it might not solve the problem or if the fruit already all has been picked, then there's no reason to do it.

If it seems like this is going to be a perpetual problem with the fruit trees, you could treat the ground beneath the tree with an organic fire ant product in the spring before the fruit becomes ripe enough to attract ants. I use two or three different organic fire ant baits. One of them contains Spinosad and the others contain abamectin. We are Fire Ant Central here and I ignore them for the most part, but don't like having them in the garden. If there is one fire ant mound in my garden, it will be in the middle of a bed of root crops so that the millions of ants get to come running out of the mound, biting me when I'm digging potatoes or onions or whatever.

In general, ants (well, not fire ants) are beneficial, but not when they're inside your peaches.