It seems we have ants, the large black ants. Any homemade solution suggestions? I’ve read borax and sugar works. I do have a dog so I want to be careful.
I just ordered this yesterday. https://www.amazon.com/EcoRaider-Killer-Crawling-Natural-Non-Toxic/dp/B00GD752XO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1525734233&sr=8-3&keywords=non+toxic+ant+spray
I had used another non toxic brand before and it worked great, but I didn’t save the spray bottle, can’t remember the brand or where I got it. Hoping this works just as well.
I have dogs, also, so non toxic is a must for me.
Get ant traps, preferably the heavy-duty ones from a hardware store, not the cheap ones. Works every time.
We had tiny ants and poured cinnamon around where they were coming in. We had tried other things and this is what worked for us. I don’t know if it will work for big ants.
It is messy, but at least it’s a good smelling mess.
We use the heavy duty ant traps, and they would be safe around pets. Ants were gone within a day.
Do you have a product name for the heavy duty ant traps? Thanks.
Years ago we went to using an “ant service” - I know it seems like overkill but my local ants were seriously as organized and persistent as The Borg and I couldn’t stand to use poisons inside, especially as I had little kids. Here’s what the service does (and you can probably do it yourself). They use a sprayer that produces a very narrow, low volume stream and they walk around the outside perimeter of the house and treat just the area just where the pavement or gound meets the house wall or foundation. They don’t put much of the ant killing liquid on the perimeter but they walk around the entire house and get every linear inch. That stops the ants from getting in. If you just kill the ones that make it inside you have to keep killing them and they can even colonize your house. If you keep them from getting in from the outside you never have to use poisons inside again. The service comes every two months and we haven’t had any problems with the dogs or kids ever getting close to the poison - they would need to lick the house to 1/16 of an inch from the gound to become exposed at all (I suppose that is possible but it never happened). Good luck!
We had bad baby ants for a couple of years. We used Terri ant bait things outside. They have little things you hammer into the ground to keep them in place. We also put some indoor stuff in places like under the kitchen sink. We haven’t had them for a couple of years now, but they were bad in our neighborhood for a couple of years.
I’m not sure about the big ants, but Terro works on the regular ants. It seems like I get them every year about this time, but with Terro, they are gone within a week or two.
Another vote for Terro. It isn’t instant, but it works.
We have crazy amounts of ants…depending on the season small to big you can watch thousands of them march in line all over the place…ick…I require H go for the do it yourself pest control website products. Same stuff the for hire people use. We’ve never found anything off the shelf in the main stream hardware stream that actually gets rid of them for more than a day or two. My husband also always trims everything back so nothing touches the house so they don’t have a marching path right into the house.
I have dogs, too, and we have had service puppies in the house for the last few years so we have to be really careful.
I have used a thin paste made of borax, confectioners sugar, and water, but I only put in in the spot where I could see the ants crawling up the foundation outside the house. You can cover the area after application to keep dogs away. I’ve used a sled over treated areas, for example.
The borax mixture outside was more effective for us than the heavy duty ant house thingies or cinnamon indoors. One application in the right spot helped for years, like they never came back in the numbers they used to every year.
Very cruelly, I have also poured boiling water where they were coming out of the ground and marching to the house. When my kids were small, they got into everything so I had to be extremely careful about anything toxic.
When I hear big, black ants I think carpenter ants. You definitely don’t want carpenter ants in or near your home as they will eat wood like termites.
If what you have is carpenter ants, I highly suggest you get a pest control company to service your home. Carpenter ants are a big problem where I live because it is very wooded. They are attracted to water. As described in #6, the service will spray the perimeter of your foundation outside. They usually do mine 2-3 times a year. We just suck the cost as annual maintenance required to live where we live.
Spring is a big time for carpenter ants to be on the move and look for new homes and a place for a queen to nest.
@doschicos I think these are Carpenter ants. I’m renting so I will let the homeowners know. I actually found some boric acid, so mixed it with the sugar and water and I will see how that works.
I don’t think borax works on carpenter ants. I just saw a couple on the deck. They must have trickled from the 40-year old ivy-covered stump that we hacked out last fall. Gotta call pest control. Ugh.
Agree about concern over carpenter ants.
Those little tiny ants swarm to the Terro liquid. Hundreds appear within hours, making you wonder where they have all been hiding out. I also sprayed the perimeter as @CaMom13 described.
My understanding is that the stuff used for carpenter ants differs from stuff used for regular old ants. They are attracted to different bait.
Yup. You are right. Maxforce is what I was told works to control carpenter ants. Grrr. Gonna get some.
I’ve also been told by our exterminators to NOT spray the carpenter ants if you see them. If you spray and kill the ants you see, then you aren’t solving the bigger issue which is the nest. They want to see where the ants are coming and going from, their entry point into your living space. The idea is to put the bait traps on their trail so they bring the poison back to the nest and kill off the ant colony. The downside to that is that the problem will seem worse before it gets better because the ants will be attracted to the bait and it takes awhile for it to take effect. It could be a week to 10 days.
We have some fire ants on our property. We’ve found that pouring some borax on the hills kills the mound