There are ants in my home. LAst night I noted two or three little black ants on my desk, which is in my finished basement office. I slayed them. After telling them great jokes, I killed them.
Today there were a LOT of little black ants on my desk, and every few minutes I see another.
I have seen them nowhere else but on my desk, which I have scoured to ensure has no food on it. I can’t seem to locate their entrance point, and they’re definitely not nesting in the desk. So this seems to be a minor infestation at present. I must kill them all before it gets more serious.
Thing is, I don’t want to call an exterminator and spend big bucks. But let me ask you this: do ANY store-bought ant killers suppress infestations?
So I’m asking for two hints:
How best to destroy the little black ants? (They are definitely black, but don’t appear to be large enough to be carpenter ants.)
Are there in fact any store-bought ant poisons that work or are they all bullshit?
We called in the pro’s, who charged us $100 + $30/month for three months to do… well, as far as we can tell, pretty much nothing. They did leave invoices in the mailbox, though.
Finally, when they were through collecting our money, we went and bought a box of “Grants Kills Ants” little ant trap thingies, which were tremendously effective. Once in a great while we’ll see them, but this stuff worked very, very well.
This spring I had a little ant party and these traps have seemed to work great.
The hardest part was not disturbing them so they can take the killer stuff back to their little ant houses. I very much wanted to smash the shit out of each one I saw, but left them alone comforted by the thought that they would bring death upon their families.
Also, I have no pets or children in the house and cannot speak to the safety of the product I recommended.
Spiders. You need more hungry spiders.
Failing that, I’ve had great success with the store-bought ant poisons that come in little disks. The ants take the food back to their friends, and in a week or two they’re all gone.
They’re inexpensive and fairly safe around kids and critters as the bait/poison is a solid and stuck inside the disk. (assuming no one decides to crunch the thing open) We tend to put them in out of the way places like behind the sink as a precaution.
That’s the same stuff I use and it works great. I feel like Jim Jones while I watch them feeding on it and taking it back to the hive.
“Drink, drink the wine!”
I second the Grants. I tried Terro and borax stuff for years in the kitchen, because every summer I’d get ants. Last summer I put the Grants in the kitchen, and no more ants. A different species has shown up in the bathroom this year, but I’ve got a bait in there now, and I’m fully expecting them to be gone in a few days. So far, the stuff hasn’t caused any problems for the 2.5 cats I have.
Nope. There’s a stray kitty who comes to visit for a while before going off to do whatever it is cats do when they’re not lording themselves over bipeds.
We love the Grants too. We buy this blue liquid stuff and squirt a puddle on a square of foil, which we place next to wherever they’re coming out. They swarm all over it for a day or so and then they all disappear. It never seems to fail, and we get ant invasions every winter.
You have to keep in mind that ant nests often come in layers–there will be a nest right under the surface, and then another one a ways below that one, and another below that. So quite frequently you’ll get the lower ants coming up and moving into the nest you just killed, but they’ll all die after a while.
I bought several Raid solutions; the ant drops, which I believe are more or less the same as Terro, were a huge hit. The ants were like a fat family at the buffet; they just couldn’t get enough. I also spread the stuff outside, and put in little Raid spikes, which also seemed very popular. There hasn’t been much activity lately, I would assume because they’re gorging on the bait, which I put right at their entrance point as well as outside. So they seem to have brought a LOT of poison back into their nest in the last eight hours.
Been there, done that, wish it was a more exclusive club. Grants is my hero!
Read the label and get some for grease (oil? fat? something – read the label, use your brain) ants, and some for sugar ants, unless you can find an obvious food source. Then buy both and save the other box for next month anyway.
My mother battled ants for 20 years. She tried ant stakes, boric acid and many poison sprays that were as harmful on her as they were on the enemy. It got so bad, she put her sugar bowl in a saucer of water to form a moat. (Useless, as spilled sugar only makes a sweet swimming hole for the little beggars.)
**I, Myself, have vanquished the pests and with little trouble or expense. **
I use Ortho Home Defense Perimeter & Indoor insect killer. It’s a plastic gallon jug with a spray gun on a cord that “Kills bugs inside and out. Guaranteed.”
Outside, you spray anywhere the enemy might enter the home: vents, across the garage door opening, cracks, around the outside garbage can…whatever. Look for ant trails.
Inside, you spray where they enter the room. You might also spray around the indoor garbage can. (Cover exposed food. Wash food prep surfaces if spayed.) In as little as one blast of the spray gun—wherever they enter the house—they pack their bags and vacate the area smartly.
I used to reapply every 4 - 6 months, or after a heavy rain, but fell out of the habit. Now I spay when scouts appear. It works!
You should be able to find this WMD in any garden store, Home Depot, and like that. There is another product by RoundUp that seems to be the exact same thing, but have not used it.
$20 and 20 minutes and you, too, can become a Semi-pro ant vanquinator.
