WHat else can I do about my ant problem?

July 25, 2005 9:26 PM

Ant Problem, is there anything else I can do? a few days ago I found a few ants in my kitchen so I set up a few an traps hoping I could catch the few that where there, the next morning I woke up and found many many ants swarming an area of my kitchen and storage room.

I put down powdered borax and icing sugar around the problem areas and it has helped, the ants are not swarming as much anymore, but I am still finding a bunch around, and even worse some are migrating to other areas of my kitchen. Have I done everything I can do? My landlord isn't being very helpful, he just set up a few traps outside. Do I have to wait it out a few more days before I become worried? Sorry if this question has been asked before, I'm just wondering if there is anything else I can do.

posted by bluehermit to home & garden (7 comments total)

I grew up in a house that had a serious ant problem. There were literally periods of the year that parts of our house were swarming with ants (mostly the kitchen). The typical drill when the ants showed up was to clean all the food out of the infested area, set traps and spray with ant spray that you can get at just about any grocery store. Chances are, if there's no food for them to go for, they'll go away eventually. I would make sure that after they leave you be very anal about not getting crumbs or food on the ground, cleaning as much as you can, and making sure you have no open boxes/bags/etc. Put everything in ziplocs. Seriously, just one crumb would bring the ants back.

Look around and see if you have any holes in your walls, cracks in the floor or areas where they might be getting in. Spray in these areas and put traps down around them -- even cracks between molding on the wall and the floor is a potential problem.

There was a while where we had an exterminator come to our house. He would spray around the outside of the house and in some of the areas where the ants were bad. It literally worked wonders and I would say if the problem persists you should convince your landlord this is the best method to take. You may be lucky and this is just a one time occurrence. However, my parents still live in the house and, even though they were gone for years, every now and again for no particular reason the ants just show up.
posted by ebeeb at 9:49 PM on July 25, 2005

AskMeFi does ants very well.
posted by dhruva at 10:35 PM on July 25, 2005

We had a similar problem not too long ago and I turned to google for help. I'd supply links but... try it. There is tons of advice on the net to handle this.

The problem is: there is too much advice. And people pretty much swear that every substance known to man is anti-ant. So we thought we'd start with the simplest, non-toxic one on the list: black pepper. Worked like a charm, at least for about 2 days. So we sprinkled every two days, and figured if we had to do it from that point on, that wasn't too big a hassle, but after awhile they stopped coming and didn't come back. We did it around openings and anywhere they seemed to be forming highways.

As a result, I can't swear for/against the other 1000 things out there recommended to drive the little buggers away, but check out the lists and try some of the non-toxic solutions you feel like trying out first. Maybe ants really are this sensitive and a whole host of things do in fact work.
posted by dreamsign at 10:38 PM on July 25, 2005

I have a carpenter ant problem, and they are a bit more resilient to traditional ant killers. I picked up some Terro mentioned in another askmefi thread. It's the 2nd day of using Terro and the ants are going through it fast and not paying attention to the donuts that I left out overnight (as a test). It's pretty cheap, $4 a bottle. It's been a pain refilling all the bait every 2 hours, but I suppose that's a good thing in the end.
posted by idiotfactory at 11:15 PM on July 25, 2005

Must be a good year for ants.
Terro used to work like gangbusters, because it used to have arsenic in it. Apparently, too many married folks considered it a problem-solving device for more than one purpose, and it doesn't any more. Last time I used Terro, they thought it was salad dressing, but a lot of people still have good luck with it, maybe it depends on what kind of ants you have.
Our house has a concrete slab with a big crack in it, and ours seem to nest in the crack and run around in the heating vents, which I mention only as another place to look for where they are coming from.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 5:14 AM on July 26, 2005

so we moved into a new house, and quickly discovered that it had a pretty serious ant problem. the previous owners had those square ant baits all over the kitchen and one of the bathrooms. no ants, but then it rained, and they started coming in.

i put out fresh baits along the walls, and for about a week i watched the ants carefully and found that they were coming in through tiny cracks in the grout in the tiled part of the living room/entryway floor. i ran around with a caulking gun with clear silicone and plugged as many of the holes as i could. same with the upstairs bedroom/bath.

i followed the same observation technique in the kitchen, and eventually i found a huge (1") hole in the cabinet above the stove where the electric was coming in to power a light fixture. it was an ant-bonanza... all of the ants in the kitchen were coming in through that hole. i sealed it up and watched carefully for a few more days and slowly all the ants disappeared. we've been ant-free for 6 months now.

this may not be applicable to your situation if your house is old and has too many penetrations, but in my case the previous owners had put up with this problem for 7 years and it turned out to be easily solvable.
posted by joeblough at 11:17 AM on July 26, 2005

It's not difficult to dramatically reduce or eliminate ants without poison. Simply find and plug the main holes, as joeblough says, and then eliminate the food supply they've been using, be it scraps in the sink, pet food left in the dish, unsecured grain or sugar in cabinets or something else.

Those two very simple tasks have always done the trick for me. If the ant colony has ready access to easier food (and it almost certainly does), it'll quickly learn to avoid your place and move in that direction instead. Also from direct personal experience, try using thick chalk (like kids' sidewalk chalk) around the holes or over the main trails. Chalk interferes with the chemical trail ants leave for each other to follow; you can watch this yourself by chalking across an active trail of ants. A few simple roadblocks can dramatically increase the difficulty the ants face in finding food in your house, which is often all that's needed to encourage them to go elsewhere.

Without poison.
posted by mediareport at 6:57 PM on July 26, 2005