Here in Oregon, it started raining (surprise!) several weeks ago, and the ants have decided to head for higher ground. This year, for the first time, this apparently means my house, all the way up to the second floor in some cases.
I’ve tried the usual no food anywhere/keep things clean.
I’ve tried commercial bait packs.
I’ve killed the little buggers by the hundreds.
I’ve seen some Borax ideas that seem intriguing, but they all contradict each other (use sugar, don’t use sugar, melt sugar, don’t, etc).
I turn to use, the teeming millions. Any ideas for how to rid myself of my new “besties”?
Please forgive the typo. Exceeded the edit window.
Can’t sprinkle anything around the outside of the house because of the RAIN thundercrack MWHAHAHAHAHHAHA! ahem. I should probably have more coffee.
I will look for Terro.
Sari I might take your squirrels, on the theory that my cats would deal with them. But my cats might decide to love them and squeeze them and feed them and name them George. :rolleyes:
I just use bottle caps and pour the solution right into it, I don’t worry about cotton balls. The ants swarm all over the cap and are usually 99% gone by the next day.
Also for cleanup and area denial Windex or generic equivalents kills on contact and will keep ants away.
Or maybe that’s just an old-wive’s tale, I dunno. But my grandmother used to spread salt around the inside of the window sill in her kitchen, to keep ants away. She said it worked.
And it’s easy to try.
We use powdered boric acid, available at hardware stores. It’s often labeled as roach killer. Pour it around the entry points inside the house and anywhere a concentration of ants is found.
Wikipedia says: “Boric acid…is generally considered to be safe to use in household kitchens to control cockroaches and ants. It acts as a stomach poison affecting the insects’ metabolism, and the dry powder is abrasive to the insects’ exoskeletons.”
From here: “The Terro Ant Bait consists of a mixture of boric acid and sugar in a liquid solution that attracts sweet eating ants.”
I question the need for sugar since the ants are already there – why would you need an attractant? I think you’ll find plain boric acid to be quite effective and more economical than Terro.
I use a homemade borax and sugar mixture as well. Ants which eat sweets love it. They swarm around the puddle.
The contact killers don’t kill enough ants, even though you are killing hundreds. There are thousands more to kill. Borax kills slowly, which allows the ants to go back to the colony and gives
Liquid poison is more effective than solid poison because adult ants can’t process solid food. It needs to be taken back to the colony.
I live in Oregon too and I feel your pain. Terro baits are the way to go. The only issue is you can’t kill the ants. You have to be patient and let the ants find their way to the bait. It doesn’t take but a day or two, but it will completely eliminate them.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to pour borax (or any poison) on the floor if you have cats in your house. They probably won’t try to eat it, but they might accidentally step in it and then lick it off their paws.
We kinda need to know what sort of ants they are. I know everyone’s got an idea, but there are many kinds of ants, and different types are better dealt with using different materials. There’s a really big difference in how you deal with pharaoh ants, carpenter ants, or moisture ants (all of which are common in your area.)
The last time I had an ant problem, I used poison bait outside and a barrier pesticide product (like this) around all the wall/foundation junctions, doors and windows. I used the barrier outside because this was California and pretty dry, but up here in Washington state, I’d probably apply it indoors. Most of these are designed for either option.
What’s nice about barrier sprays compared to sprinkling anything on the floor (besides not having powder everywhere) is that you can spray a vertical surface. Ants have no trouble finding cracks under window sills or the like.
Terro is basically just making boric syrup batches and little delivery devices for consumer convenience. They make a nice profit off something most people can easily do in their kitchen if they knew how.
The sugar attracts the ants to the syrup, not to the area. Since they’re good little colony-supporting scavengers, they’ll dutifully gather up the sweet stuff and share it with their brothers. That’s the trick, really: Sharing the poison throughout the colony to debilitate the whole nest. It’s a different approach than spraying a petroleum distillate on the path to kill the visible critters and make the rest want to go elsewhere.
Seconded (or thirded, or whatever).
1 part sugar dissolved into 4 parts water. (Basically hummingbird feeder solution)
Plus 1/4 to 1/2 part boric acid.
My habit over the summer was basically to make a big batch of hummingbird feeder solution and stick most of it into the feeder, then put the rest in an empty soup can and stir in a guesstimated portion of boric acid powder. The killer potion would then get transferred to recycled little pill (or vitamin) bottles. I’d punch holes in the caps and thread a facial tissue through each one to act as wicks.
Then I’d go find the ant trails on the outside of the house where they were finding cracks to enter. I’d set the Borgia Cocktails right on the trail and tip the bottle over, intentionally causing some of the solution to spill out onto the trail. That would cause the little buggers to go into panic mode and they’d scurry around and quickly find the syrup. Then I’d just leave the bottle for a couple of days while the ants either harvested each drip from the cheap wick, or found a way to crawl inside the bottle and gather the solution directly for themselves. By the end of a week, there’d be no more ants. The pill bottle(s) would then be dropped into the trash (not recycled) along with the poisoned soup can.
Note, however, that while this trick tends to decimate a colony and often kills the queen, eventually there will be untouched eggs that hatch and restore the colony. And, of course, there are always other colonies…