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O.T. $%#$%#$ Ants!ouse

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gmach10

Hot Rolled
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Location
N.E. Illinois
Anyone else have trouble with ants during the summer? We keep the kitchen counters spotless, scrub them down after any food prep, take the garbage out every evening and still get ants. Does anyone know of a product that I can put down to get rid of these things. It's a brick house and I maintain it pretty well, no gaping holes in the mortar etc. No obvious signs of where they might be coming in. I did repair a separated sewer tile last summer. Is it possible they could be coming up through the kitchen sink drain? I was thinking of putting bleach down the drain to see if it slows them down. As always, any help would be great. Thanks, Glenn.
 
gmach10 said:
Anyone else have trouble with ants during the summer? We keep the kitchen counters spotless, scrub them down after any food prep, take the garbage out every evening and still get ants. Does anyone know of a product that I can put down to get rid of these things. It's a brick house and I maintain it pretty well, no gaping holes in the mortar etc. No obvious signs of where they might be coming in. I did repair a separated sewer tile last summer. Is it possible they could be coming up through the kitchen sink drain? I was thinking of putting bleach down the drain to see if it slows them down. As always, any help would be great. Thanks, Glenn.
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.
i went around house and caulked where basement wall and siding meet. basically big ants crawl up wall and enter under siding. it stopped the bigger carpenter ants 100%
 
I have anst here and they can come up through a crack in the conrete slab. I am on a slab foundation. In the summer they are most likely just looking for water. What I have done is to mix boric acid and sugar water, put a drop or two of this where they will find it. The hardest part of this is leaving the ants alone while they collect it up. When the ants have made a complete circle around the droplet of food it is time to give them a second drop. Just leave them be. They carry the boric acid/sugar back to the nest where all the other ands eat it, then the all die in the nest. So do not freak out when there are 1000 ants collecting up the boric acid LET THEM DO IT.
Some ants are sugar ants and some are meat ants. I have good luck with the sugar water. I can not remeber the exact ratio to mix in boric acid but not to much Sugar is twice the water though, it needs to be like thick syrup so it will stay in a large drop. To much boric acid will scare them away it. Roach proof is boric acid.
 
Every spring I get one or two rounds of ants. I use the Terro liquid ant baits, and they work great. Put them where they can find them, ants then swarm to them (don't smash the ants, you need them to take the bait back to the nest), and two days later they are gone.

Previously, I have used borax mixed with either water and sugar or canola oil. If I remember right, sometimes ants are looking for sugar, sometimes water, sometimes fats. The Terro has worked for me the last several years. I don't think it is possible to get rid of the ants permanently, at least not with reasonably safe chemicals.

Very unlikely they are coming from the drain.
 
mfisher said:
Every spring I get one or two rounds of ants. I use the Terro liquid ant baits, and they work great. Put them where they can find them, ants then swarm to them (don't smash the ants, you need them to take the bait back to the nest), and two days later they are gone.

Previously, I have used borax mixed with either water and sugar or canola oil. If I remember right, sometimes ants are looking for sugar, sometimes water, sometimes fats. The Terro has worked for me the last several years. I don't think it is possible to get rid of the ants permanently, at least not with reasonably safe chemicals.

Very unlikely they are coming from the drain.
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I 100% agree. What baits do is destroy the particular colony that is giving you trouble.

Scout ants leave a chemical trail that other ants follow back to the food source. Cleaning only the most visible surfaces might still leave a trail that ants will follow until it ends where you clean. Then they will mill around trying to find the rest of the trail. I use a mild Dawn detergent mix on a paper towel to wipe suspected areas of infiltration.

PS: I hate to start spraying insecticide around living areas so when I do find clusters of ants inside I vacuum them up and then suck up a little powdered insect killer. They don't ever crawl back out.

"Ve vill execute zeze spies so they don't report beck!"
 
Get them every year here no matter how spotless I try to keep the place. Terro is the only thing I've found to work with the small "sugar ants". Knocks em out after a few days or a week.
 
How bad are they ?

This spring, I had a talk with a few, to warn the others, and
some of the rogue ones, I squished.

Got the word out right quick.
 

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I have the same sort of spring problem and I've had good luck with Combat Max ant killing gel. It comes in a syringe, and you spread a bit of it on the ant track. It is usually a one and done.

There's some evidence that the active ingredient (Fipronil) is hazardous to bees, so I don't use it outdoors. It's pretty harmless to mammals.
 
We use Termidor, which is intended for termites and is effective against ants. A light spray all around the house for a foot or so out seems to keep them out. We have to renew it in about six months.
 
No worries- Global Warming and rising Sea Levels will end your problems.
I live in a river delta, and the fields around here all flood 2 or 3 feet deep every winter.
As a result, no ants. Ants live in the ground, and when the water table is high enough, they move someplace drier.
Which they did, where my farm is, about 20,000 years ago.
Of course, we have dikes, ditches, sloughs, and pumps to maintain, but, no ants.
Since 40% of the US population lives on the coasts, all we need is ten feet or so of sea level rise, and a lot more people wont worry about ants. They will other, bigger problems, but no ants.
 
I find that Terro just feeds them and never gets rid of them. I now make my own sugar water/boric acid solution and it gets rid of them. Boric acid or diatomaceous earth are my first line of defense against bugs. Boric acid attacks bugs cental nevous systems, very effective and works on all bugs including fleas and termites.
 
For the first time in 15 years I didn't do my normal routine of using the spreader to create a "no-bug zone" with bug killer granules about 10 yards wide around the house. For those previous 15 years, we rarely saw an ant. This year we got a similar to the O.P.'s tiny ant (sugar ant?) infestation in two separate rooms of the house. Opposite ends of the house. I smashed a few of the ants on their "return" trip and looked at them under a loupe, they appeared to be carrying some form of goop or similar type substance. Assuming they are snacking on some building material or another. Maybe part of a dead mouse they found in the wall for all I know. Anyway, I mixed up some of the borax/sugar and added a little syrup. Set it out in shallow lids in the two sites where they were most heavily concentrated. They swarmed it for about a day and a half, then their numbers dwindled. After 3 days barely saw a couple a day. While they were swarming I was easily able to follow them to their infil/exfil point. After the 4th day I sealed up those points and haven't seen one since.
 
Scottl said:
I 100% agree. What baits do is destroy the particular colony that is giving you trouble.

Scout ants leave a chemical trail that other ants follow back to the food source. Cleaning only the most visible surfaces might still leave a trail that ants will follow until it ends where you clean. Then they will mill around trying to find the rest of the trail. I use a mild Dawn detergent mix on a paper towel to wipe suspected areas of infiltration.

Vainlla extract is effective at screwing up their phermone trail. Wipe on paper towel and then swipe that perpendicular to the line they march along.
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It's important to know what kind of ants you are fighting, they are not all the same. Carpenter ants like solid protein based baits, and the little house ants (sometimes called sugar ants) like sweet liquid baits.

The baits like Terro are not effective, and you can make it yourself with borax and powdered sugar or maple syrup. This is cheap, but not all that effective. But you can do an external peripheral coverage of the house with it on the cheap, it won't hurt. It helps to keep things like roses and bushes trimmed back from the siding.

The best bait for house ants is Advion Ant Gel. It's a Dupont product that was bought out by someone else (can't remember who). The active ingredient is a slow-acting neurotoxin that only affects ants. They have time to take it back to the colony and feed the queens and larvae. You can't get it at Home Depot, but you can buy it on Ebay.

Do not kill the ones you see- they are the delivery system for the poison. You want them to take it back to the queens. These wanderers are the adventurous ones. For every ant you see on the countertop, there are 100 in the wall.

On house ants, do not use insecticides. House ants are social colonies- they don't war with each other, and if the colony is threatened, it will bud. One becomes 2 or 3 or 4. A single colony can have up to 100 queens. They are very hard to get rid of. If you just have to kill the wanderers, use Windex.

The UW did a study some years back, they DNA tested house ants in a neighborhood in my town. They found a single colony covered several square blocks of residential area.

I get them every spring, and I bait them with Advion for a few days, then I have no problems for the rest of the year.
 
Cant' we all just get along ? Poisoning 'em, painfull slow deaths,
adding more toxins to YOUR environment.

Play nice, provide them with a little food, shelter, etc.

Oh...your already doing that....:skep:
 
Cannot understand those saying Terro does not work.

The Terro has worked 100% on all ants for me, with the exception of the Rasberry Crazy Ants (Electrical ants, Nylanderia fulva). The crazy ants do not care about it except at certain times of the year. It even works on them, at those times.

You MUST give the bait time to get back to the nest in volume.... it's hard to tolerate them, but spraying or squishing visible ants does zero good, and may make things worse. Squishing them will bring hordes of soldier ants, who are uninterested in food, they want to fight.

if you really cannot get them to eat the bait, then go get a box of "20 mule team borax". Sprinkle it around the nest exit, or across the trails they are taking. They will pick it up on their feet or antennae, clean it off with their mouth, and transmit it to the nest anyhow.

It takes about 4 days, but when you have killed the nest, you are done.
 
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