House Ants

What is the best way to get rid of those stupid little critters that tend to perk up everywhere. I have tried bombs, sprays, and traps, but nothing seems to work. They are those little sugar ants and they are everywhere. I figured they would go away since it is winter time, but they just don’t quit. Anyone have any ideas???

Ants can be pretty persistent. The reason that sprays and bombs don’t work on them is that the ants you see are the workers, and the ants in the nest can replace them almost as fast as you can kill them. To really rid your house of ants, if there is a nest inside, you have to find it and kill the queen. If the nest is outside, you might be able to find where they’re coming in and block the access. Any topical poisons you use are probably doing more harm than good, since they’ll kill everything in sight, not just the ants.

Ant baits work pretty well. They contain poisons which the worker ants take back to the nest, and that will eventually kill the ants that you don’t see. I’ve had luck with the commercially available ant baits, or you could mix some boric acid (check at a hardware store) with something sweet and sticky, like syrup or honey, and put it out on squares of coated (waterproof) cardboard somewhere that children and pets won’t find it but the ants will. You’ll need to be patient, but eventually you’ll be rid of the ants.

Here’s the start of a trail of ant threads. :slight_smile:

When I was in middle school we had an infestation of just the kind of ants you describe. Dad came home with this special poison he bought at the supermarket that was a clear, sticky sweet liquid (like what InternetLegend said, but not homemade). He put it on little squares of cardboard around the kitchen.

All the ants would gather around it like a little watering hole. You could actually see their little abdomens swelling up with the stuff, until the sun shone straight through them. After they were full they’d stagger back the direction they came, I assume to distribute the poison among their brethren.

I can’t remember how long it took, but after some time the number of ants coming to feed on the poison started to get thinner and thinner, until they were finally all gone. You’d think they would have figured out something was up.

Our house used to get infested every winter when the ground would freeze. Resealing the floor of the garage (where they were getting in) helped for a while, but after a few years they came back. We tracked down the path they were taking and laid down a thick layer of poison all along it. That did the trick.