Enough is enough! We have a massive organized invasion and nothing seems to work. The little bastards seem to be coming in around the kitchen window and around the electrical outlets and light switches above the counter. So, here’s what we’ve tried:
[ul]
[li]ant traps, two different kinds, located EVERYWHERE, as the instructions indicate[/li][li]bleaching the trails[/li][li]bleaching the counters[/li][li]gallons of windex[/li][li]a kitchen so relentlessly clean it could be the O.R. at Princeton-Plainsboro[/li][li]leaving windexed dead ants on the wall as a warning to other ants[/li][/ul]
I can’t find any nests outside, or anywhere else. Also, we live in Arizona if a hard freeze might help, it ain’t going to happen soon. Gah!
Try a water and vinegar mixture. The strong aroma of vinegar completely overshadows the ants pheromone trail they leave behind to lead others to the treasure of your delicious human food.
Obviously, if they have a base set up inside your house this won’t be much help but it will help prevent them from getting back to anything interesting quickly.
Getcherself some boric acid - it’s a white powder sold at any hardware store and often at the grocery store.
Getcherself some drinking straws and cut then into coupla-inch segments.
Mix equal parts boric acid and jelly (the original recipe calls specifically for mint jelly) in a little paper cup or something until you get a thick opaque paste. Use a toothpick or Q-tip to shove a little of the mixture into each end of the straw, and then tape the segments along their paths, where they’re coming in/out etc.
The big pro of this is that you can tape the bait out of reach of children/pets. The big con is that it takes a while. Eventually, though, they will simply disappear.
Well, the standard advice is to nuke em from orbit, and really, even that’s not guaranteed with ants or roaches or fleas.
First I’d try bugbombing the house myself. This means that you and any animals that you like have to spend several hours out of the house, and then you get to scrub all the dishes and pots and pans because you don’t want to eat that poison. If THAT doesn’t work, then it’s time to call in a hired killer, that is, an exterminator. Ants are tough little bastards, and are not easily discouraged.
When I lived in Florida, I had an invasion of small ants. By the time that I got rid of them, just about every food source in my apartment was in the refrigerator. I just tracked the trail to what they were eating, and acted appropriately. I remember that the last food item that I had to relocate was Crisco shortening!?! Airtight containers may also help.
I doubt that the ants are entering to just hang out.
Terro liquid ant poison. It’s like a syrup. Just leave a lot of blobs around for them to feed on. When you see them feeding DON"T KILL THEM. Let them ingest a bunch and drag it back to the nest to share with their friends. Drink! DRINK!
After a day or so they won’t know what hit them and how you managed to infiltrate and wipe out their exsistence.
What Hampshire said. My son’s house is regularly invaded by ants. He sets out some Terro traps and zap they’re gone within a day or two.
Last time I visited him, the ants were crawling up the walls in the kitchen – reminded me of wagon trains in old western movies. It was fun to watch, for awhile.
When it was my mom’s house, she opened her entertainment center one day to find thousands of ants – piles of ants. She had to toss her VCR. She hired an exterminator and had monthly service for several years. She’d still get ants. The Terro traps work just as well as the exterminator and cost a lot less.
You will get a bunch of home brew solutions here today. Mine is to use WD-40 if the smell does not bother you too much. Keep it away from human food of course. Ants hate WD-40. It appears to have a lasting effect at removing them too. If you can find a trail or an entrance hole, hit that big time. Hit the thresholds. Test it out on a small scale to see if it’s going to work on them. Give it a couple of days before giving up. There are immediate effects and some that take time as survivors make it back to the crew.
2nd the advice for Borax. It’s in the laundry aisle as “20 Mule Borax” or something like that. Sprinkle it around thresholds and in the cupboards and a few days, no more ants!
As an added bonus, it’s not toxic to dogs or cats, to the best of my knowledge.
We had those tiny ants infesting our kitchen one summer. We tried Terro and they ate the crap out of the stuff, but it didn’t seem to put a dent in them. We were finally successful by spraying all along their paths and the baseboards with Raid ant killer. Never saw them again after that.
We live in south Florida, where it’s hard to avoid bugs. We have an ant invasion every so often. We have a regular exterminator, hired by our landlord, who sprays outside the house. Sometimes he’ll ask us if we’re having any problems inside. The last time he asked, I had just set out some ant traps. He gave me two or three additional, heavy duty traps. I’m not sure what was in them, but it was a clear gel. He said NOT to place them by the windows, because they’d attract new ants. He suggested a few spots to put them, and as noted upthread, reminded us not to kill the ants. The bastards were gone within a day or so. Another suggestion he had was to make sure no tree branches are touching the house.
We battle this every damned summer and have tried all the usual suggestions listed above. Nothing works.
And we have a spotless kitchen…but the little pissers can find one speck of anything and form an army to come check it out. We can’t even put anything with a speck of food in the dishwasher or they start climing up the drain - we can’t let a speck of toothpaste hit the sink in the bathroom or they march up that drain - and don’t even think about dropping a speck of food within 40 feet of the house.
I feel for you, really. My place has the same problem every spring/summer. They’re gone during the fall and winter but once the weather warms up…ugh. They find the TINIEST bit of food possible. I had to start keeping syrup and honey in the fridge because no matter where I put the things, in the oven, on top of the fridge, across the kitchen, they found them. I would clean my counters of all visible food only to wake up the next morning to find a bunch of ants crowded around some invisible bit of food or food residue or something. The only thing I found that worked somewhat was cinnamon. I’d sprinkle it around the edges of the counters and the ants would disappear for a while. At least until the smell of the cinnamon would wear off :\
Okay, then. I did try
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[li]vinegar before resorting to bleach. No luck.[/li][li]Borax. We get scorpions, too, so the perimeter of the house, the window sills (outside) the bathrooms and kitchen are lousy with borax. Ants abide.[/li][li]Terro traps (but not the gel itself). Nope.[/li][li]Raid. Outside, only. Around the outside of the kitchen window and around the base of the house. Best I can do. Mr. Ko hates having that stuff inside.[/li][li]every edible thing in the refrigerator. Check.[/li][li]spotless dishwasher. Check.[/li][/ul]
On the other hand
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[li]there is an evil tree branch that hangs over the roof[/li][li]I do have two ant traps in the kitchen window. :smack: Who knew?[/li][li]I haven’t tried WD40, straws with goop in them, coffee or cinnamon (and hey, did you know that if you put your jar of honey in a little dish of water that ants won’t be able to invade it? Well, so far…)[/li][li]haven’t bombed as bombs won’t sit well with Mr. Ko (see Raid)[/li][li]also haven’t tried professional exterminators[/li][li]or nuking from orbit (yet)[/li][/ul]
I think it was in the book The Demon in the Freezer where, to eradicate Marburg virus, they sealed a whole building and pumped in chlorine gas. Tempting. Very tempting.
Thanks and keep the suggestions coming, if you have one I haven’t tried!
You can’t just use Borax, you need to mix it with sugar (that’s what Terro seems to be, except somehow liquefied) or Equal so that they eat it, not just walk on it. They love love love it. But don’t make the mistake I did and put such a trap near your computer desk: they’ll all come to to the trap then you get doppy-from-being-poisoned ants crawling on you. Now it’s in the laundry room.
Arizona here. Oddly enough, out here, they don’t come for the food. Once a year, they invade looking for water. One year, they got into my iron because I hadn’t emptied it. Ruined an iron, the shirt I was trying to iron, I threw out the pad just because. Dang, I hates ants!
I would suggest that you get a ladder out and douse the tree branches with Pam. They get trapped in it. I tried olive oil once this year (no Pam) and it washed off with the next storm.
Here’s what my 100 yr old gran taught me when I was staying in ant infested student digs. (She herself lived, most of her life in a tar paper shack, so I figured she knew a thing or two!)
Cucumbers grow on the ground but you never see ants on them. Strip the skin off a cucumber, or more if need be, and slip it into every crack and gap. And where I lived there were zillions of cracks and gaps, plus the place was located next to a bar/restaurant parking lot. She promised it wouldn’t liquefy or rot, only desiccate yet still work. I had a cat and really didn’t want to use anything chemical, so I tried it.
It worked completely. I only did it once, yet I lived there another 5 yrs and never, not ever, saw another ant.
As you’ve tried every other thing, I say, give it a go, what have you got to lose but ants?
Do let us know how it works for you. (Although, no one I have ever recommended this to have ever reported failure!)
Fucking lil bastards even ate through the metal foil packets of my Pop-Tarts!
But they are not as bad this year as the fruit flies, that constantly swarm the kitchen.
We had mutant killer ants in our apartment in Egypt, and what’s worse is that they were completely invisible on our marble countertop. So I would start doing food prep on the counter and the ants would swarm up my forearms and bite me, leaving itchy, painful welts that took days to disappear.
A frequently mentioned remedy in Egypt that I have not seen posted here is: chalk. Allegedly, ants will not cross a chalk line, so simply draw firm chalk markings around your cabinets and the ants’ entry points. I have no idea if this works.