Ants! F#&^%ng ants!

The BBQ Pit
1

Ants, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
I loathe thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
Thy little nibbles between my toes.

Okay, I could go on, but even ants don’t deserve Liz B. B.

I genuinely love working for the company I’m at right now (stay with me - this is relevant). Instead of getting sent to sea for up to 300 days a year, I get to stay home. Basically all the time. Well, not during the work day, but you get the idea.

However, I did have to travel to wonderful and exotic Rochester, NY for essentially the entire month of July. For training. For this company I love so.

No biggie. I’m not completely dim, I understand I need to prepare my place to be empty while I’m gone. Also, having been married for eight years, I’ve been civilized to a decent degree. There’s not huge piles of laundry and waste all over. There’s art on the walls and matching plates in the cupboards. I’m a modified bachelor, at best!

So before I left, I cleaned the place up extra good. All perishables disposed of. All unnecessary electrical appliances secured, with the exception of leaving the A/C at a moderate level - yanno, to prevent growth of things in the immoderate Houston climate. Even asked the apartment management to poke their heads in, once in a while, to ensure lack of floods, fire, bear inhabitation, what have you. I tried! I HONESTLY TRIED!

But when I returned, the discovery was soon made, that it was all for naught. Ants on the kitchen counter. Ants in a little trail going around the plastic mat my computer chair sits on! OK, I could maybe understand that - I do have a tendency to eat here. But how fucking long can they live on an invisible supply of crumbs? And what were they eating in the kitchen, the paint off the Formica?!?

But the indignity doesn’t end there. Oooooh no. These sadistic little pismire bastards actually have the gall to climb up on me, while I’m sitting here trying to get a Dope fix (or what have you), and bite! While I’m sleeping, they BITE! Little fuckers! This is war!!

Battle ground BigGiantHeadQuarters is rendered sterile. No foodstuffs left anywhere. All corners vacuumed. Ant baits are placed in strategic locations. Immediate satisfaction is gained in the sight of the helpless bastards entering and exiting bait pods. That’s right … feeeeeed, you little shits. Take some home to Mama.

And soon, ants are no more. Not seen for several days. Operation Pismicide is declared a success.

Just a little too early.

They’re back, and stronger than ever. Apparently, they were just spending a few days getting used to having poison in their diet. So, we now live in an uneasy detente. I keep finding out new things about what they like and don’t:[ul][li]A couple of grains of rice pilaf, dropped during preparation: within 30 minutes, covered with an army of invaders. Within another 60, rice and all scouts are completely gone.[]My generic Target-brand (apropos, I think) glass & surface cleaner makes a highly effective ant “cleaner”[]They’ll ignore a loaf of bread or sleeve of crackers for a couple days… but once they find it, ya gotta say goodbye.[]A cutting board, bloody and fatty from chicken prep? Uninterested.[]But a strainer and pot used for making spaghetti, and rinsed before being left in the sink? Could hardly tell what color they were. Brown, apparently. And alive.[/ul]So that’s my story. Someday, they will be mine. Oh yes, they will be mine.[/li]Or alternately, I was planning on moving out in a month or so anyway. Let the next guy deal with it. :cool:

  • Dave
2

Dave, I feel for you, but…Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!

I fucking HATE ants.

3

AntWarfare can be just as emotionally trying as cockroach warfare… though I’ve never had to engage in the latter, I can realize a certain feeling that comes from fending off bugs.

I have found one thing that works very well, and requires little effort: cayanne pepper. I don’t know if other peppers work, if you care to go through the effort of getting some caspacin (extracted from habaneros, of course, for maximum volume) it would probably work too.

I have never had any luck with commercial products.

So anyway, ants tend to creep inside from wall/floor junctions. As terrible as it sounds, I would deliberately bait ants with some tasty foods. A good, solid food source will form an ant trail the likes of which movies have never dared to dream (ok, not true, I’ve seen the movie). But it is a fantastic way to find out exactly where they are getting in.

Then you haul out the vacuum cleaner, suck those babies up along with the food, and get out your pepper of choice (again, I’ve only used cayanne… it worked, no need for further experimenting) and sprinkle it around the area where they get in. Reapply every once and a while (I think I did it about every other week) and you shouldn’t have to worry about them again.

The first application needs to be pretty broad, then decreasing over time until you are basically just stopping the spot(s?) they enter through.

Good luck. Ants don’t fuck around.

I should mention this method works best on carpet, but can be used anywhere.

4

And they smell when you squash them. Yuck.

5

Just about every spring if it gets really wet outside the ants in my backyard decide to go on vacation in my house all 23,524,524,645,032 of them and they are the really really small ants. So I end up bringing a couple of hundred of them with me when I go to work. Granted after a week or so they get bored with my house and go home, but all I have to saw is EEEEW! get out of my fucking house.

6

so if you can figure out where they’re coming in, get some peppermint essential oil, put it on some paper and leave it laying there. The essential oil is strooonng stuff, so don’t get it on your hands because if you touch your face or eyes you’ll regret it. Don’t apply it directly to your flooring or walls either, it could cause damage.

Or go to the drug store and get some boric acid. You might need to find a little mom-n-pop place or other old timey drugstore in order to find some. It’s sold to be dissolved in water as an eyewash. Find the ant trails and sprinkle the dry powder along the trails. What the boric acid does to them is dessicate them…it sucks all the moisture out of their little nasty ant bodies. All they have to do is walk through it for it to work. The boric acid that they take back to the nest will kill the ants there, too.

Another thing that works along the same line as the boric acid is borax. You’ll find it with the laundry stuff in the grocery store. “20 Mule Team Borax” is the brand easiest to find. You want pure borax (sodium tetraborate), not “Boraxo” or “Borateem”, just the plain old borax. It dessicates the ants like boric acid, in fact the two are very similar chemically. But the ants need to ingest the borax. Make a mix with equal parts powdered sugar and borax, and enough water or vegetable oil to make a paste. I prefer the vegetable oil because the water dries out too fast. Put a little bit of the paste on a small piece of cardboard and set it near or on top of an ant trail and they’ll find it. It can take a few weeks for it to get all the little buggers, so keep replenishing the supply as needed.

Another surefire way to kill them is to go outside and find the nest or anthill, and dump a gallon or so of boiling water into it every day for three or four days. Instant dead ants. You’ll end up with a patch of dead vegetation for awhile, but it’ll grow back.

I had an infestation last spring. I’ve also got pets and children all over the house all the time. I wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of the traps and sprays, so I found other ways to get rid of them. It took about two weeks from starting with both the boric acid and borax until I saw the last one. Now, if I see an and colony starting in the yard near the house, I get it with the boiling water.

7

Bob the Angry Flower has all the answers to your ant problems.

8

You know, as much fun as all these methods sound, I’ve given up on ant warfare, myself. My solution? Mercenaries. Highly trained, well-equipped, versed in the latest in chemical warfare, they’re gonna be spraying down my house on Thursday afternoon. Good riddance, pests!

Exterminate! Exterminate!

9

Okay, this stuff is the s**t, really.
I’m not sure of the actual name (it’s at home, and I’m not), but I got it at Home Depot in the pesticide area, for $3.99. It comes in a little tiny bottle, there isn’t more than a couple of ounces of the stuff in there, but you don’t need much. You put a couple of drops in various places where you see the, and sit back and watch.
It works along the same lines as the bait trap things, but way more effective. If there are ants nearby the drops you’ve put out, within minutes they’ll be all over that stuff. They take it back to the hive, and it kills 'em all. Dead dead dead.
I put it out on Saturday (two days ago), and this morning I wake up to PILES of dead ants all over the bathroom. Not the most pleasant thing, but better than piles of live ants. This stuff really works, trust me.

10

Deej has the right idea.
Try mixing boric acid with mint apple jelly (tough to find), and put it in plastic bottle caps here and there. That should do the trick. I’m from Houston and everybody in my neighborhood had this problem a few years ago- although not quite as severe .
Kill those little ant bastards!!

11

Terro-X. Works like crazy. And, if you’re like me (and it seems you are) you can have hours of fun watching as the ants greedily slurp up Liquid Death. Two days later, buh-bye anties.

You’re welcome :slight_smile:

12

Some plain advice.

http://infoventures.com/e-hlth/answers/ants.html

13

God, you mealy-mouthed Martha-wannabes are pathetically prosaic. I post a beautiful, verbose, profanity-laden rant, and at least half your responses are about quick and easy ways to solve my problem? What is this, fucking GQ? Where are all the tortured souls?!!!

:smiley:

14

now that’s not much for an ant is it…with their depth, breadth and height tending to zero…

15

Terro-X? I’ll have to keep that product in mind. I’m getting ready to move in a week, and I hope I won’t have an ant problem in my new home, but I have a TERRIBLE problem in my current abode. The funny thing is, the ants have infested every room of my apartment EXCEPT my kitchen. (not a ringing endorsement for my choices of food or my cooking abilities). Also, I can never find a distinct trail. I’ll have a bunch of ants all kinda wandering around aimlessly. I know they are coming in through the walls though. I think my apt building is sitting on top of a huge colony of ants, because I see lots of them outside crawling into little holes in the walls…::shudder:: I can’t wait to get out of this place. And I recently read a short horror story about a man and his battle with ants…and the ants won…::double shudder::

16

Ummm, gotta read the whole thing there, big x. "I loathe thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, … " Much bigger than an ant. High-school level reading f’r comprehension, donchaknow. It’s a good thing. :wink:

  • Dave