<p>I’m familiar with the ingredients in both ant killers. It’s why I use vinegar and water, though I’ve never used either on carpeting, though I can’t see why you couldn’t.</p>
<p>
Ok, I’ll call you crazy :). After dealing with numerous ant invasions, I can feel nothing but satisfaction when I watch the little heroes enter the Terro Tub of Death. Bwahahaha…</p>
<p>I consider myself a compassionate person, but yeah, I’m with blankmind. I’ve never used the outside version for fear I wipe out a colony that didn’t come in, but once they send their emissaries inside my house, all bets are off.</p>
<p>One of the bowls has about 8 ants in it. Ants apparently go in and then leave. The remaining five inside traps have no activity. The outside traps have no activity. It appears that these things are highly location-sensitive.</p>
<p>I have seen none of these outside so I’m hoping that the ant trails have been broken with the Windex.</p>
<p>Science experiment!</p>
<p>I’m an experimental person so observing and recording is something fairly natural to me. No different from the diet/exercise thread where the participants post the observations and findings and perhaps assist others.</p>
<p>Last night, I thought that there had to be a thread on ants but it took me a few pages of searching to find this thread and it has been quite useful in tackling this very annoying problem.</p>
<p>Ants are mostly gone from the bowl near the door. They swarmed one of the tabs with a drop of Terro on it for a while and the population number is down there. I was a bit surprised that they went after that one but I think that they must be coming in from near the external door or the door to the small HVAC room. I need to clean up some stuff and get stuff out of the way to look in that room.</p>
<p>We’ll see if the ants come back tonight or tomorrow.</p>
<p>Many here said that they disappeared after a day but the packaging says that it can take up to two weeks for them to completely go away.</p>
<p>In the meantime: no eating in the basement.</p>
<p>We were invaded with grease ants today. I have never seen them before, maybe because they are so very, very small. Will see how the Terro works for BC.</p>
<p>I looked up grease ants and it appears that you have to mix oil or something fatty with the Terro for those ants. Getting the mix correct is tricky too. Maybe someone has a formula out there for mixing your own blend.</p>
<p>The ants have taken the Terro and took off to somewhere - I don’t know. We’ll see what happens in the morning.</p>
<p>I’m making a lot of use of the local Asian custom to protect food from ants by ‘storing’ it in such a way that the ants need to cross water first before getting there. They are actually not very good swimmers (understatement). An example: I put bread in a bowl that is placed in larger bowl. The larger bowl contains water. It also helps if you put (plastic) bowls filled with water under the legs of a cupboard. It is very simple and it does the trick. I’m less fond of chemical solutions when food is involved.</p>
<p>I mentioned my anxiety over ants to my wife and she mentioned the water stuff. She told me that she grew up in an environment with ants and other insects all over the place so that it didn’t bother her much.</p>
<p>Holy Cow! Multiple thumbs up for Terro ant traps! Yes, the work great and quickly.</p>
<p>Evening report, two days after using Terro. One of the bait tabs is still producing with some ants on the tab (can’t tell if they are drinking or dead) and there are some ants going towards it and away from it. The ants are in a far more confined area now which makes me happy as I have to worry less about them going upstairs. I added a little more Terro to that tab. The bowl that had a lot of ants in it yesterday is now empty. I wonder if there are two nests. The bowl is about six feet from the producing tab.</p>
<p>I can see the trail from the producing tab but only for about two feet. They going around an old car wheel in a plastic garbage bag. I assume that the ants that went in and out of the bowl came from outside or the wall. It is possible that they both came from the HVAC room which I haven’t gone into yet. At any rate, the number of visible ants has declined and those that are visible are interested in the bait. So it appears to take more than a day for our situation. It may be because we didn’t have ideal placement of the bait tabs.</p>
<p>One other thing: we have a lot of spiders that have set up shop in corners and edges and they seem to have limited where the ants can go. This is a positive thing in general though it can be a negative. Son had an infection on his inner elbow a few weeks ago which was pretty nasty. The doctor guessed a spider bite. Son is aggressive with spiders in the upstairs areas now.</p>
<p>TaiTai–I’m with you on chemicals in general. Terro is recommended by environmentalists because the chemical is simply boric acid, which is generally considered environmentally safe. (I wouldn’t put it on the floor if i had a 2 year old who might drink the whole thing, but otherwise, it’s not going to have any negative effects as far as I can tell.)</p>
<p>Ants are still crawling around the two tabs by the wheel. Numbers are not growing but I’m not sure that they are shrinking either. I’m just happy that they’re confined to that spot. There are a few ants in the bowl this morning. I’m not sure where they are coming from but I’ll leave it there while they keep showing up. There must be a lot of ants around to keep coming back for more of the Terro.</p>
<p>Observations this evening: ants are still at the Terro tabs though the number tonight is a bit lower. There’s one ant in the Terro bowl by the outside door and a large spider has set up shop above the other Terro bowl. So the status is the same - ants are hanging around the Terro tabs and going back and forth. Still waiting for all of them to disappear.</p>
<p>They aren’t wandering elsewhere so my anxiety level is a lot lower than it was. I do have a mind to take the wheel outside so that we can look under it - I suspect that the nest is there and we might have a ton of dead ants revealed by moving it.</p>
<p>Not that many visible this morning. Maybe about three or four on the tabs (they might be dead) and about three or four wandering around the car wheel. I’m definitely getting hopeful that we may be near then end. I will look again tonight when I get home from work to see how well things are working. I think that I’m going to leave the bait tabs out for the two weeks as the box suggests to try and pick up the stragglers.</p>
<p>Came home early to prep for the race tonight. About five ants moving around total on the two active tabs. No ants visible in the other bait stations. It would be nice if they were all clear tomorrow morning. I think that I will leave the things out for an additional week. It appears that this process takes a week, at least in my case, and I think two weeks to be sure.</p>
<p>No ants in the bait tabs or in the bait bowls. I didn’t see any crawling around either. Feels like victory but I will leave the baits out for another week. I think that I’m going to wait a few days before lifting up the wheel with someone standing by with a vacuum cleaner. I’m a bit scared of the potential mess that will be there. On the other hand, I could let the spiders deal with it. One week in and the problem is 99.99% solved. Great advice on the Terro.</p>