Had a problem with persistently returning ants, so I bought some Raid ant gel. The box, and everything I read online, seemed to indicate that it would be at least two weeks before the colony was killed–IF the colony was killed. A lot of people were saying it never really killed the whole colony but just reduced ant numbers for a while.
I applied it one day. Within just like two minutes, the ants had found it and swarmed it. The globule was reduced to a tiny dry bit before the day was out, so I applied some more.
Overnight they had swarmed that, reduced it to a tiny sliver again. So I applied some more. Etc.
By the end of the second day there were fewer ants swarming it.
By the end of the third day, I am now seeing no ants whatseover even after having applied a bit of new gel.
Where did the ants go already? It seems far too fast to have actually killed the colony. (Indeed, it’s not even supposed to kill a single ant for at least a week as far as I know!) But if they’re not dead, why aren’t they still eating this stuff? They were treating it like mana from heaven the first day.
Do you like to eat the same thing three days in a row? They ordered out for Chinese, watch for a tiny car being driven by an young ant with lots of acne.
I didn’t think it would take weeks to kill a single ant if it contains the popular pesticides for that purpose, just that it would take weeks to kill off the whole colony. The idea is that it takes a little time for the ants to die and they carry the poison back into the colony where other ants eat their dead bodies and poison themselves. It’s possible they aren’t all dead yet, they’re just breaking ground somewhere else now, but they’ll probably all die eventually if they’ve consumed that much poison.
One of the ants that may die, in particular, is Big Queen Mama, who is above foraging for food herself, but instead is totally dependent on her loyal subjects to feed her. If BQM kicks the sandbucket, and in particular if her loyal minions are also dying faster than they can raise up and anoint a new BQM, then that’s the end of that colony. So, of all the little buggies that you’re killing there, it’s BQM that’s the truly significant target.
We’ve just had the annual infestation of outdoor ants coming in before winter. Today, I used a homemade solution of borax, water and sugar and they sucked it up. We had three major spots, and each one had swarms of the little critters partying like it was 1999.
Tonight, none of the traps are being consumed. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.