I have had it with these MF sugar ants in my MF kitchen!

In My Humble Opinion
21

In Phoenix especially, they are looking for water.

My daughter lives in a new housing development, and they were overrun with ants about a year ago. It was so bad, they called in an exterminator.

Turns out, the little shitz were using the electrical conduit as a freeway. The exterminator went out to the access box by the street and it was filled with ants. In talking to neighbors, they were inundated as well. The exterminator pulled all the switch plates and used a poison jelly almost like caulk around the electrical boxes and as a bead around the edge of the switch and outlet plates before replacing. He then went outside to where the conduit entered the house beneath the circuit breaker box (where there were a kajillion ants), and gunked up everything there with the poison jelly. I don’t know if he also treated the access box by the street. The multi-pronged attack worked and the little SOBs were vanquished.

I hate bugs.
~VOW

22

Chalk does work. As a kid, I entertained my self during the summer by drawing chalk lines on a sidewalk and making the ants walk around for my amusement. Yeah, I was a strange kid.

The problem with chalk is that it washes off and doesn’t work well with Arizona landscaping.

Cucumber peelings work for cockroaches as well as ants.

A saying we have here is “If it doesn’t try to stick you, sting you or bite you, its not native to AZ”. I’m really thinking that the tree branches close to the OP’s roof is the problem. If coating them with Pam doesn’t work, a chain saw might help.

23

I’ve used Terminix in two houses with great results. For some small sum (something I didn’t even think twice about, like $100 a year), they sprayed inside and out on the first visit, then came around and sprayed outside every so often. They said they would come back for free if I ever saw any ants but I never did.

24

I’ve successfully used talcum powder, or bicarb soda along their marching route to get rid of them.

25

Ok so not quite the same context, but I did discourage the repeated looting of my pantry by carpenter ants by taking them down one by one with a vacuum hose.

I kept the nozzle handy and the instant I would see one of those gangly ninja quick black ants they got sucked into the void. Soon they stopped coming, I imagined the queen recalled her forces since none of her scouts were returning. But then, they reappeared in another part of the kitchen. Sent out in pairs these were special forces ants. Trained to pick up the scent of the last raiding party theses ants were methodically picking their way back to the pantry. These guys were tough, incredibly strong they would grip the wall and resist the vacuum, until their last leg let go. It was the final act of war. Demoralized, they accepted defeat, finally no more ant sorties.

:wink:

26

Update: okay, new traps are in place, both commercial and borax/sugar. The little shits are moving in formation – whole honking battalions of them. How long do I have to hold my [Windex] fire before I can be sure that a sufficient number of them have taken the payload back to the nest?

I. Can’t. Stand. It.

27

[quote=“koeeoaddi, post:15, topic:595410”]

[li]Terro traps (but not the gel itself). Nope.[/li][/QUOTE]
Use the syrupy Terro stuff, per Hampshire’s recommendation. Might take a few days, but it’s never failed for me.

28

I grew up in Florida and as someone else says, you always have bug problems.

We used to use terro but there are different kinds of ants. Some are sweet ants and some are fat ants. So if you’re ants aren’t eating the terro, you should mix some sort of fat, in the liquid as they are probably fat ants.

Diatomaceous earth will work. Most of it is used for bed bugs, but it works on all insects. The thing is it doesn’t work right away. I when the bugs call through it, it leaves cuts on them and they die that way. When you buy DE make sure do not get pool grade DE, this is dangerous. The food grade DE is safe. They even feed it to animals. If you use DE make sure you just dust it on the floor. If it’s a lump the ants just walk around it

The problemw with terro and DE is you have to let the bugs live. They eat it or crawl through it and that kills them, eventually. People usually want them dead on site.

29

My compromise with this has been simple but effective:

  1. Put a gob of the Terro syrup on their pathway, as close as you can manage to the place they’re entering the room from.
  2. Feel free to squish any ants that go further into the room.

Enough of the ants will grab some Terro and take it straight back to the nest for it to do its job. Killing the ants that explore further into the room won’t substantially slow its effectiveness. As long as you can live with a cluster of ants around the Terro glob, and a trail of ants coming and going for a few inches between their entry point and the glob of Terro, it’s the best of both worlds.

30

You might not be using enough Borax.

Borax has never failed me in any insect-control situation. Sometimes the kitchen winds up looking like a gang of teenagers had a “borax fight” in there, but if I line every joint, threshhold, and corner with a nice solid mass of it, they ALWAYS stop coming in. Usually I don’t even use sugar, I just make a thick barrier of powder.

Everything else is either mostly for entertainment, or too toxic for my comfort. Borax ALWAYS works when applied right.

31

Terro has always worked for me. And as a bonus, it’s the cheapest solution I’ve found. It does take about a week, but it knocks out the whole colony. and they love it so much that they quickly concentrate their efforts on that, and leave the rest of your house alone.

32

Did you try the traps that coats them with the chemical that they bring back to the nest? I think killing the nest ultimately works better than just killing your “guests”.

33

the Terro syrup has sugar in it that you place in a path used by the sugar ants on their way into your house. it doesn’t take long for an ant to find it, it feeds gluttonously and leave a strong sent trail on the way back to the nest. in the nest it communicates the high volume high quality food news to others and they will come by the dozens to that site, lined up check to check feeding. they take the bait back to the nest and feed it to others. this continues until none come back.

34

From the trenches: I just made and put out a boric acid/sugar syrup solution and man, oh man, those little bastards love it. I’m not sure how long I’m going to be able to stand this outright assault and may have to opt for the RTFirefly Compromise™ strategy.

35

I thought I had sweet ants one time but they never took the poisoned baits I put out for them. Turns out I had fat ants, I mixed the bait with peanut butter* and the ant problem was gone.

*To do this I had to compromise the safety measures on the ant traps. I was single living alone with no pets, It was not a problem for me, but might be for others.

36

Try adopting a wicked witch cackle and encourage them: “Thaaaat’s right, my pretties! Take the poison back to your frieeennnndddss.”

37

Hey, I thought I had my webcam set to off! :mad:

38

Ants ate my girl scout cookies.

Not my own personal boxes, you understand, but the ones that I’d actually sold to people. It was my senior year of high school and I wasn’t too enthused about selling cookies, so I only sold about 20-25 boxes. I set them on the family room floor (big mistake, apparently), and the ants got to them all. The council was nice enough to exchange them for new boxes, so nobody got ant-y cookies, but I was PISSED.

The only thing that seems to work for us (and I know you said you couldn’t use this, OP) is ant-killing Raid. It doesn’t keep 'em from coming back, but it sure is satisfying to see that pile of teeny little corpses crumpled up on my kitchen floor.

39

I think the time has come in this thread for a gruesome tale of slaughter.

I once stayed in an idyllic hut built right alongside rice paddies in Bali. As huts go it was very luxurious - while it was pretty much open to the elements, it had its own kitchen and bathroom on either side of the bedroom, which as you will see is important to the story.

Naturally there were many pests such as mosquitos, but I just slept under a mosquito net to minimize the impact. However, around the third day that I was there, I had a very restless night … all night long my head and shoulders kept feeling little prickles.

I thought I was just imagining things, but with the morning light came a repulsive discovery. The night before, I had thrown papaya and banana peels into the trash bin in the kitchen. All night long, armies of ants had trudged back and forth from the entrance to their nest, which was in the bathroom, to the organic goodness on the other side of the hut. The most direct route was right across the head of the bed.

Now, when I saw “armies” please understand that I mean multitudes. Entire nations, nay civilizations, of ants were tromping across my hut. The “line” of ants was about a foot wide.

I summoned my landlord, who didn’t seem particularly surprised or disturbed. He recommended that in the future I not leave anything accessible that ants might want, advice I was fervently willing to take. Meanwhile, he grabbed a large economy-size can of Baygon (our Indonesian equivalent of Raid) and began a genocidal attack.

It was stunning to watch as battalions of ants instantly went from being an undulating carpet to frozen in place. After he had sprayed all of their little ant-souls up to the great Ant Nest in the Sky, he got a broom and began sweeping the carcasses into a pile.

This was the most memorable part of all. The biomass of swept-up ants was gigantic. You know what it would look like at a hair salon if three brown-haired people simultaneously decided to get their long hair cut short, and then the snips of hair were all swept up into one towering pile of hair? That’s what the dead ants were like.

Bali lost just a little of its charm for me after that.

40

Another DE user and poisoner here.

Food-grade inside, pool-grade in the crawlspace under the house, and professional bug-killer with the pump-spray poison around the base of the outside of the house.

We have cats, and they’re dumb, and like eating bugs, so we try to keep the poison outside. DE-coated bugs won’t do anymore harm to them than regular bugs.

We finally had to hire the spray-around-the-outside-of-the-house dude about a month ago. No bugs in weeks now. It wasn’t so much the ants (which are annoying as fuck, especially when they invade your dishwasher) as the spiders the size of my hand. I don’t do spiders.

When it was just the ants, we did pretty well with the DE alone, but apparently nasty eight-legged freaky things are more tolerant of being sliced up into bitty pieces by ceramic razors.

One of the first things we did along with the DE was to clear away all the trees and plants from touching the walls and roof - that cut down on the outright invasions and left us with regular small recon parties. Those always came in from one place, so it was easy to leave a few DE barriers for them to march through. They really don’t like that stuff.