Ant invasion bites!

Posted on Mar 15 in Life in Evansville, gardening reference, homemade, living simplyby TalinaPrint

I’ve been running around the house like a madwoman cursing and going on just about every time I enter the kitchen. Everly thinks my rants are funny, I am not amused though. The cause: tiny black ants that are seeking warmth and moisture under things like the espresso machine and the water distiller. It’s a full blown Ant invasion!

We’ve been plagued by these little buggers just about all winter. How they are entering the house I have no clue but we have been super diligent about keeping the kitchen clean and keeping foods sealed and out of their reach. Still ants come and take up shop in various spots. We’ve even noticed them living in the soil of a few of our indoor plants.

Now, come spring we’ll be able to take all the indoor plants out for re-potting and we can leave them out there until they are all ant free. In the meantime we have been trying all sorts of home remedies for annihilating the ants and ending the ant invasion.

Vinegar is a great kitchen disinfectant and it also is said to destroy the invisible ant trail (so other ants can’t find their way in). We’ve been spritzing vinegar water on them to kill and stop them from returning. Did this for about two weeks now but the ant invasion is not over. We also wiped the counter down real good between killing sprees. Still the ants return.

We tried a honey, sugar and borax “bait mix” with hopes of having them take the poison borax back to the colony where all the other ants would die after consuming it. Unfortunately, none of them really touched the poison bait mix. It was out for several weeks.

We have been told by neighbors to get some commercial ant bait/ poison since they had the same issue that was solved this way. It is just with our zoo of animals and Everly we aren’t jazzed about any kind of bug poison in the house. We try to limit our toxic chemical usage. We don’t even use bleach…

Anyway, today I’ve resulted to making up a different/ less toxic bait mixture. I found it here and am using the yeast, molasses and sugar one. So far the ants are drawn to it, hopefully it does kill them. We wont know if it’s worked for another week or so though.

That means another week of becoming pissed every time we enter the kitchen and see the little bastards on the counter. Everly will be amused at least. Here is what the madness looks like today:

“Ants, ants, go away. Don’t come back another day…” May this ant invasion end very soon, please let it end soon.

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2 Comments

• Donna B. says:

  March 17, 2010 at 4:04 am

  I don’t think that’s exactly the type of ants we occasionally have problems with. Ours are brown and a little smaller, I think.

  We started trying to trace the trails to see where they were coming from and found them to be coming out of the electrical sockets and around the kitchen window. We would occasionally see them around the bathroom windows too. So… we looked outside and yep, there were trails to the windows there! Sort of hard to see at first on brownish red brick.

  We did use poisons, but not on the counters. We sprayed around the outside of all the windows in the house and then took the covers off the electrical sockets and loosened the boxes in the kitchen and bathrooms so we could spray into the walls. We used a brand that comes with a thin straw to direct the spray and contained pyrethrins.

  The other thing I did was caulk around the windows and facings. When we had the windows and doors replaced later, I made sure the contractors used caulk as well as nails when installing them. They thought I was crazy, but I just stood there and told them humoring me would be easier than arguing with me.

  Anyway, that was well over five years ago and we haven’t had an infestation since. We haven’t sprayed outside specifically for ants again, but we have a problem with wasps, so parts of the house get sprayed occasionally anyway.

  As you know, just killing the ones that get in isn’t going to do much good in the long run, but isn’t it satisfying to crush the little buggers with a piece of toilet paper and flush them?

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