Took a couple of years, but I got there. I only wish I didn’t find it after reusing a bowl and finding them crawling on my food. 
I’ll be buying ant traps and making sure my dishes are clean and no food residue remains. Any other tips? I couldn’t tell where they’re coming from yet.
Do you have pets or small children?
I had an ant problem a few times in my first apartment. Raid or Combat ant baits did the job in a few days.
Don’t start killing them until you determine where they are coming from. There is usually a trail of them, faint at first, but then like a freeway, based on their pheromone path. Once you have the entry point determined, plug it up with caulk, glue, or whatever, then wipe down the trail with dish soap or a bleach wipe to erase the trail. Also, when you clean up the kitchen, keep things dry - as they also are attracted to moisture (they’ve invaded our dishwasher more than once).
Also, report the invasion to your condo assn, as they may be able to bring in someone to spray around the outside areas to keep them from coming inside in the first place.
No pets or small children. Am planning to get bait traps.
I did try to determine where they were coming from, but there were relatively too few to tell. Noted on moisture. Will try to hold off to see if I can determine entry point. Good idea on HOA.
Very much this. We had an invasion of ants coming in our front door a few years ago (the cat’s food dish is within about 5 feet of the front door which is what they homed in on). We carefully cleaned the whole area with diluted bleach (some sites will say vinegar, but others suggest it will attract more as a food byproduct) and put out Raid traps, and kept cleaning the area with the diluted bleach every other day for about a week. No return of the problem so far.
I’ve had a lot of luck with the Terro liquid stuff. Put out small blobs of it on little squares of cardboard and let them feast away. You’ll be tempted to destroy them as they come to feast but you have to let them come in droves and carry it back to their nests to feed everyone at home. You’ll be rid of them in a couple days.
Make sure no cooking oil residue is anywhere around your counters. They really like that.
Yes, have the property sprayed.
+1 for the Terro baits with the liquid inside a small, plastic container. I follow the trail outside and of course the freeway is there, too - just place one of the liquid baits along the trail and it kills the nest in a few days, wherever it is.
It looks like the ants are coming from underneath the kitchen counter. The back straddles the line between carpet and linoleum, so there’s a gap where the counter passes over that line. Not sure there’s a good way to plug it, and it seems they’re coming directly from underneath as well.
I put out the traps (Terro, as it turns out); I think I’ll use their use to confirm my theory on origin. I’ll clean the sides and corners once the ants are gone.
The ants at my place were coming from under the carpet where it met linoleum as well. I couldn’t figure out how to effectively plug the hole as it would need to be whole length of the floor. I put out baits. It was years before I had another ant problem.
Clean first. Then put out the poison.
Remove the attractant first. Seems logical to me.
I discovered an ant problem in my condo on April 4, 2021 (don’t ask me why I remember the exact date). I bought some Raid baits that day, but they did absolutely nothing. Then I bought the Terro baits, and the ants were almost instantly attracted to them. The problem was solved in another couple of weeks.
I was a child in West Africa where we had “proper” ants. The kind with pincers that easily penetrate skin and I can vouch for how much formic acid stings.
Ants are famous for their organisational skills and our kitchen table legs were stood in bowls of disinfectant. This worked okay until enough ants drowned and their friends could use them as a bridge.
I found them fascinating and recall spending hours watching dozens of them push a 5-gram sugar cube off a table, across the floor and then, amazingly, up a wall and through a window.
You may be sure that hygiene in the kitchen was a priority and all food was kept in sealed containers.
You need to use the baits which the workers will bring back to the queen and kill her. I had to use them last year here, and being a nature nut hated doing it (I was the kind of kid who would have an ant farm), but cleaning and scrubbing the counters and floors had no effect. I think I used the Terro ones, but the linked page doesn’t mention it killing the queen; haven’t seen any here since tho.
Gah, one of the traps either spilled or leaked, and the bait oozed out onto the floor. I really want to clean it, but it’s the one closest to the ant source (which is where I thought it was) and the ants are gathering and lapping it up. I guess I should leave it alone, but it just feels so wrong to have that spill and not clean it…
Peppermint oil! They will avoid it, and will not cross a barrier.
A single drop on a Q-tip rubbed around the entrance area will do the job (and smell up the room for a few days afterwards).
During the last year of my parents lives, ghost ants were a perennial pest in their assisted living facility.
These things were not visible until they congregated in the hundreds, probably thousands which we found spreading inside on a wall from an exterior door. Disgusting. Housekeeping to director blamed weather location and all the big hotels,here have same problem. Pest control probably made it worse.
To me it was a sign of impending doom. We’d sit on the patio and they’d swarm towards our feet. My folks were beyond caring. And they did die. Not because of ants. I just took it as an omen.
I had them only once in my place - it’s on the third floor. One day, never having seen a single ant before, I found dozens of them in the kitchen. I had no idea where they were coming from. I had a bottle of liquid Ant-Rid from years before and put a pool of it on a square of plastic on the bench. Some time later there was a line, like a stain, running diagonally across the carpet from the corner of the lounge room. Many, many thousands of the little black critters. So I put another pool close to where the line started. They slowly thinned out past the bigger, closer pool of poison. I topped it up for the night and by morning my problem was solved. I haven’t seen a single ant since.
I’ve also had good results with Terro Liquid stuff both inside and outside. Just let them have at it and they take it back to the colony and poof they are gone. I have also used a Borax/sugar mixture outside in the garden with good results. The recipe is on YouTube from many.
I’ve never had small pest problems* in my current (15 years) house but have used boric acid & some peanut butter in the past and ants are gone in a week. Smoosh it around in a baggie, snip the tip to neatly apply. Boric acid is safer for mammals than a lot
of insecticides and cheap; I used to get it at the dollar store.
*TWO squirrels and still no idea how they got in.