Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with ant

How long does it take to kill an ant?

bluefly — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:01:21 -0800

How long does it take ant traps to work? I used Combat Traps that have the Combat Ant killing Gel inside them. Also, does the poison reduce in efficacy/potency over time? The best I can find is that after you put them down, you should replace them in 3 months. Is this because the gel gets used up by the ants or because it loses its potency? I ask because I bought these traps a couple months ago but never used them until this week, so I'm wondering if I'm still seeing ants because the traps are old. (Also, if you use the Metafilter search (all sites) for "ant," you get absolutely nothing -- so common a word, but nothing! I did do a Google search but didn't find an answer).

A plague o' my house?

mrhaydel — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 06:17:19 -0800

What might be causing the things seen here in this photo and this photo? The stuff in the first photo kind of looks like an amalgamation of insect...stuff, for lack of a better term.

The second photo looks like droppings to me.

Both photos were taken no more than a foot away from each other, and the wall seen above the baseboard in photo 1 is an external wall in the house. We haven't ever come across either of these things anywhere else in the house.

Has anyone every seen the likes of what's in the photos?

How do I prevent whatever it is from accumulating any more?

ants! ants! ants! kill! kill! kill!

grumblebee — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:40:02 -0800

Help me rid my apartment of ants! They're little black sugar ants, and up until a couple of weeks ago, they were everywhere. I made sure food was packed away, bought a bunch of those little ant "hotels", sprinkled cinnamon and boric acid everywhere... nothing helped. (The ants avoid the cinnamon and boric acid. But they just move to another location in my apartment.)

I finally gave up and called in an exterminator. He sprinkled something that looked like pepper in various places, said "leave that stuff there for a week," and left. I had to go out of town for ten days. I just got back, and there are still ants running around on the kitchen counter.

However: that pepper-like stuff did help. I'd say it killed (or scared off) 80% of the ant population. I feel like if the exterminator had just sprinkled some more if it, in a few more places, I'd be antless.

Does anyone know what the "pepper" is? I don't want to call the exterminator back and pay him to sprinkle stuff on the floor that I could sprinkle myself.

I have a dozen bodies to clear.

ignignokt — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 10:53:43 -0800

Do house centipedes leave behind the corpses of their prey? I have a TV on a cabinet in the corner of my living room. Just now I looked behind it to find a bunch of black dots, which turned out to be curled up ant corpses.

I see house centipedes on occasion, and they are known to eat ants. Do they just suck the innards out and leave the shells the way spiders do? Or do they normally eat the whole ant body?

If it's not the centipede eating the ants, what could be leaving the corpses there? I'm not spraying or leaving any traps out, and there aren't any other visible bugs around.

Is this a termite or an ant?

timwindsor — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:55:15 -0800

Is this an ant, or a termite? Photo inside. After paying to replace a lot of (old) termite damage, I've become paranoid. Tonight, I saw about 50 of these buggers crawling on the outside of my house.

All of the indicators say this is an ant (three-part body, inward-facing antennae), but help me get a good night's sleep MeFi exterminators.

A photo of the insect in question.

This is an ant, with wings, right?

What do I do with an ant Queen?

asavage — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 11:49:46 -0800

So last night, I found what I think I've determined is an ANT QUEEN crawling across the carpet in front of my tv. I caught it. What in blazes do I do now? Make a little crown? It's weird and looks closest to this.

Though with a more traditional ant head, antennae and no pincer things at the rear end of the rear section (which is six segmented). The proportions are dead on tho'. It's about 1" long. No exaggeration.

Is this a rare thing? Should I contact my local entomologist? The East Bay Vivarium? Does anyone want one?

What does it eat?

How do I manage a big Java project?

neuron — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:54:27 -0800

How do I manage the source code for a big Java program? Back in the olden days, I did a lot of programming in Fortran, Pascal and such. More recently I've developed a good general understanding of OOP and now I'm learning Java. I want to write a pretty big program in Java. It'll probably have 100-200 classes.

What development tool(s) should I use? I'm aware that there are things called "CVS", "Eclipse", and "Ant", although I don't have a good understanding of what they are.

I would strongly prefer to work in OS X, but Windows is also an option.

Ants plus cat equals creepy, crawly danger

mostlymartha — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:14:26 -0800

Once again, our apartment has ants. The problem? This year we also have a cat. There's tons of information out there (both on the internet in general and ask metafilter in particular) but some of it is contridictory, and much of it doesn't mention danger to pets. So, what have you used to rid yourself of the little beasts without endangering your furry friends? In previous years, when the ants have popped up, we cleaned the kitchen really well, put out the little plastic traps, and sprayed all the baseboards and common trails with the most noxious spray we could find. More than anything, we found that once we sprayed all the places they were getting in through, the problem stopped. Of course, little Imogene makes that option impossible.

Adding to the fun is that they seem to love her cat food. We've placed her bowl inside of a larger, shallow dish filled with water. This drowns the fuckers, but every piece she kicks out gets swarmed.

From scanning the threads here and Googling, I've found popular suggestions for Terro (which contains borax), straight borax, cinnamon, black pepper, and diatomaceous earth.

Borax, and Terro in particular, seem promising, but honestly, I can't tell if it's safe or not. This is the best I could find:

Borax is readily absorbed and could cause gastrointestinal irritation and salivation. Severe cases (extremely rare as the concentrations in these products are very low and therefore monster amounts would need to be ingested) would cause shaking, shivering, tremors, drowsiness, excessive thirst and in theory coma, renal impairment and convulsions. In practice these are not really a problem.

Pet owners, what has worked for you? Did your feline find Terro delicious? How, exactly, does one apply straight borax? If she licks it off herself, is that an issue. Clearly, I'm boggled.

Ants on a Computer

Flamingo — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 09:08:43 -0800

I believe there are ants living in my laptop. This morning, I saw three ants crawling on, around, and INTO my computer (through the USB port or audiojack, I'm not sure which). How can I get rid of them? Our house currently has a bit of an ant problem and we've been using Terro (Toro?) to get rid of them, but naturally I am hesitant to use a sticky poison near my computer.

For the record, it's an iBook G4.

ants! ants! What do I do?

Mayor Curley — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 16:38:12 -0800

Ant farmers must be excited because there is a bumper crop this year. We are currently infested and so is every other house on my street. We can't even leave the cat's dry food out!

How do you deal with an ant problem?

Java and Websphere

PWA_BadBoy — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 08:54:52 -0800

[JavaFilter] Does anybody know how to deploy an EAR file to Websphere remotely using Ant [mi] Basically I'm trying to write a script that'll sync new code out of source control (done), create an EAR file (done) and then have it install the EAR file onto several Websphere 4.0 instances. I'm using WSAD 5.1 right now to run Ant.

I know about wsanttasks.jar and have tried to call both the wsAdmin tasks and the stopServer/startServer/installApplication/uninstallApplication tasks to no avail. I am truly stuck at this point.

Ants ants everywhere!

jdroth — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 19:00:59 -0800

Carpenter ants. My wife and I are finally winning the war against sugar ants (thanks to a wonderful product called Terro which works better than our $300 exterminator did), but now we have a carpenter ant infestation. The nest (main nest? will there be multiple nests?) is located in some rotten 2x6 boards framing our raised beds in the garden. However, their current ant highway leads to a vent under the house. Any of you Mefites have carpenter ant experience? What worked? What didn't? Do we need a professional? If they're foraging under the house, does that mean they've probably already set up a colony there? I hate ants. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.