Where do they come from? What do they want from us? Is it water? Sugar? Most of the time it's as if they're wandering around looking but not finding - and they don't stop!
My daughter-in-law has an ant problem in her home. When she moved in, they were firmly ensconced in the kitchen and the upstairs bath. She's used Terro (which is an awesome product by the way - ants eat it, take it back to the nest and within several days, just seem to disappear. BUT it does take several days . . .) but there were SO MANY ants, that it barely made a dent. She put all her groceries but her canned goods in the refrigerator. Even her sugar is in tupperware in the fridge. Even now, if one of the babies drops a Cheerio, the ants are right on it. THEY KNOW . . .
We had a similar problem in our home. When #2 Son was 15, he accidentally spilled a soda in his electric alarm clock and quietly cleaned up the mess. Thank goodness he wasn't electrocuted! We didn't know about it until the ants moved in to the clock - and by that time, they'd nested in the adjacent electrical outlet. We ended up having to tear out that wall to roust them out.
Because of that and many other incidents, we became fanatics about foodstuffs in the kitchen - AND ONLY IN THE KITCHEN! And the ants still regularly made inroads. A friend gave us an ant-repelling recipe for mopping with and we came up with a recipe for a spray-bottle deterrent.
Mop Bucket Ant Repellant
1 gallon water
1/4 cup dish soap
1/4 cup lime juice
Spray Bottle Ant Deterrent
2 cups water
1/4 cup vinegar
2 Tbsp lime juice
2 Tbsp dish soap
We ended up LOVING these recipes because:
1. They are made up of ingredients normally found in the kitchen
2. They aren't toxic to children or pets
3. They actually CLEAN as well as repelling ants
4. They work!
When ants appear, we spray their whole track and the threshold or windowsill where they're coming in with the Spray Bottle Ant Deterrent. We leave that for a while, then wipe it down or, if it's on the kitchen linoleum, mop with the ant repellant recipe. That sends 'em packing!
I'm not saying we never have ants in the house anymore. They still want to check us out a couple times a year, but they don't seem to want to move in after the initial scouting foray and subsequent cleanup with the homemade repellant. I wish you luck with your ant adventures. Hope this helps!
Sooo... happy to have a deterrent for the ants that doesn't actually kill them. Face it - there is no way to wipe them all out, we're just replacing one colony with another and I am
ReplyDeleteconvinced we would see a layer of ants if we had a factual representation of Earth in a cut out.
In a lot of environments there would be a partial collapse of the ecosystem if the ants were removed!
They are also the cemetery workers... responsible for removing dead creatures from the land.
(I read somewhere that ants represent 2/3rds of the biomass of insects on earth.)
Lewis Thomas was a physician & etymologist who went to Harvard Medical School and was a dean of Princeton University and he said; "Ants are so much like humans as to be an embarrassment. They grow fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm & confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor and exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television."
I'd guess they probably don't vote either.
Thanks for the recipes! They sound great based on all the reasons you've listed. And there's another reason why we shouldn't let ants inside our house, having a colony reside in your home can do some significant structural damage to it over time.
ReplyDeleteLiberty Pest, Inc.
Thanks for the comment, Barbara! I'm hoping this'll help a few people, though you probably have your finger on the repellant pulse (Liberty Pest, Inc.) and don't need it. Before our friend turned us on to the recipe, I remember being on the verge of burning my house down I was so creeped out with all the ants.
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