It started off with just a few a days ago. Our house has been messy since my health pooped out when the high heat/humidity hit. Now that we're a month into a massive drought, the few ants I"d seem just 2 days ago has suddenly become a flood. I cannot figure out how they're getting in, but they seem to be tunneling under the carpet and exiting right along the tile/carpeting seam of the kitchen/dining room right in front of our cat's food & water bowls.
Anyone dealt with this before? If so, how did you fix it? Note: I cannot have the house fumigated or sprayed - my health & lungs would be too compromised.
This is a nightmare come real as bugs crawling all over, wake up and they're on my leg or fingers. AGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is there a vacuum attachment with slicer blades to make sure the ants are sliced up before they hit the vacuum bag!!! <--- No I am NOT kidding.
Identify the kind of ant. Find an ant bait gel that targets that sort of ant. Put gobs of it on little pieces of cardboard or card stock (for easy cleanup). Leave the bits of cardboard around where the ants are. The ants will carry the gel back home, and it'll poison the whole colony. Worked great for us.
Spraying ant killing chemicals on them directly, and then on their trail, has always worked for me. I haven't had an ant invasion into my home since I moved several years ago, but that used to work for me at the house I used to live in. Considering your health issues, I'd probably call a pro exterminator and tell them how sensitive you are to chemicals.
I have a pro guy come by. He sprays around the house and puts out bait traps. Never comes in. That's because I have a parrot. Any of the chemicals he uses inside would kill it. So yeah, a guy who does the outside is a good idea.
If you use bait traps, keep them out of the reach of your cats. They are very tempting for cats to play with, but also poisonous to your cats if they eat any of the stuff.
Last time I had a problem, I tracked them back to the opening (in the ground outside) and poured pot after pot of boiling water in it.
Just fought this a couple months ago. Three steps
1. Get ant baits. Let ants take it back to the nest. Wait You can spray ants trails too, but I usually just wiped them up with paper towels and water.
2. When you are sure they have had time to take the baits back the nest, spray a "defense" barrier around your house with a barrier defense spray. If you do this first, the ants will all be trapped in your house and can't get back to the nest.
3. There will probably still be a nest within your walls. To combat this, get some of the "ant gel". Remove the electrical outlet plates around where you have seen the ants and put some gel behind the plates, then put them back on. The ants that are left will find their way to the plates, and take the bait back to their nest. The good part is, you will hardly see them. Sure, it's creepy to think they are behind the walls, but better than being surprised will thousands every morning.
All that does is destroy that one or maybe two exits. Ant tunnels are huge.Originally Posted by nKoan
I assume that nKoan is not old enough to have played SimAnt. Either that, or he is so old that he forgot playing it.
Actually, now that I remember it, the whole point of SimAnt was to ultimately infest a house and drive the humans out. Kinda makes you think about this thread in a whole 'nother light.
Another vote here for the regular, cheap ant traps as they worked well for us. But yes, be careful of kid and pets.
Coffee grounds and baby powder. Ants won't cross either and are repelled by the smell of coffee in particular. Remove whatever it is their after from the vicinity, place coffee grounds over the places you can pinpoint them emerging from, and keep it up if they begin entering from another location. They will eventually give up and seek easier prey.
You can get bigger traps for those.
We had an outbreak of flying ants inside the house earlier in the summer. First there were just a couple, and I thought they were just coming in through open windows or doors, but suddenly EVERYWHERE. We finally found their source, *cue horror music* a foot away from my head behind the nightstand. We pulled the nightstand back and regular ants/flying ants went fleeing everywhere. They were making a home on top of the power source of the internet router, a perfect cone of debris forming on top of the flat, warm adapter. After a momentary freak out, we cleaned it up, it smelled terrible. They were getting in through a nearby improperly sealed hole that the cable guy drilled to put the cable through. We put up those gel things, which they love to die on. I couldn't sleep in my bedroom for a couple days, but after 2-3 days they were gone.
Every year or so I have a massive ant attack of 10-20 ants in a day. I kill them all, then a day or two later they're all gone. It's weird. But good.
Ugh, reminds me of the ongoing roach slow-vasion of my condo. We're up on the third floor, but the whole building is poorly sealed and adjacent to a large wooded area. The repair guy the landlord uses overtightened every single power outlet cover and broke them, so they're all open. The kitchen cabinets have multiple corners cut out to accommodate poorly routed plumbing, and the holes aren't sealed around the pipes. The massive floor-length windows (and the glass door to the porch in the middle of them) in the living room seem improperly fitted and the front door to the stairs/lobby area has a large gap under it.
In essence, the roaches are probably getting in via a thousand places. No food is left out, at all. Hell, I am sealing or double-sealing the few openable food items I still purchase. Doesn't matter though, the buggers just keep showing up, about one per week. I've even seen two in the bedroom, on the ceiling over the bed :shudder:.
Point of all this is to say that covering food and setting out traps (16 of them!) doesn't necessarily stop the hardiest of buggers. You need a combined attack plan. I'll be throwing down boric acid and/or gel basically along every straight line in the apartment, setting out "coffee jar" traps (tall jar with water and coffee grounds in the bottom and a ruler/stick ramp up to the entrance from a wall--roaches find coffee irresistible), and possibly risking the lives of my neighbors pets by bug-bombing the place (last resort, but seriously, I WILL NOT abide by roaches in my living space).
I HATE bugs so damn much. jpinard, good luck to you, seriously. What you've got going on would leave me crying in a ball on the floor within a day or two :(
We are experiencing a population boom and subsequent invasion of garden millipedes. There literally are millions of them out in the yard and at least 3-4 dozen of them make it inside daily. Insecticide doesn't help. They do make a pleasant crunch when you step on them, but they release a small amount of cyanide when they die and smell bad.
Here's hoping we have a good hard freeze this winter to kill some of them off.
My parents live by the coast and they have a gazillion sugar ants in the area. They keep them out of the house by keeping all food items sealed. You can take your pet dishes and put them in the middle of a pan filled with water, so that the ants can't get to the food; that might help keep them away.
At my parents' house, if you see an ant in the kitchen, you have to kill it immediately. If it find something good to eat, often there will be 30,000+ ants there within 20 minutes. They use some sort of gel that the ants like to eat (and take back to their nests) that is poisonous.
I solved our most recent ant invasion by cleaning the gutters outside our kitchen. They had made a nest up there.
I've not had huge ant outbreak, but whenever I do get ants, flea powder along the baseboards always does the trick.
As far as I can tell by looking at ingrediants, 'Flea Powder' can be any of a number of powdered, safe for indoor use insecticides including pyrethrins, boric acid, diatomaceous earth -- all of which work for whatever insect you dislike.
The ant invasion started in our house this weekend, and of course we live about 3 hours due east of you, so that's not surprising. Its incredibly annoying to get up in the morning and find 100 ants in your cat's food bowl.
I go with ant traps too, the ones the cat can't get in to. We can't spray either inside or outside--inside because of allergies, outside because we have a huge colony of chipmonks that live around our house and the wife is afraid it would poison them (which I suspect it would).
So ant traps it is. Plus a lot of stomping, and etc.
I now have a hilarious mental image of jpinard's house with a crunchy brown and white layer of coffee and baby powder strewn liberally across the floor.
All of this reminds me of my favorite Jack Handy piece, Animals All Around Us.
We had one reoccurance less than a week later, so we dumped another 5-6 gallons down. We haven't had a problem since then (2+ months now).
Maybe I just moved the problem to my neighbors house, but for all intents and purposes, my problem is solved.
Terro liquid ant bait
You can get it from the super market.
This is about the only thing you'll need.
Don't bother with the little traps, this stuff is cheap and effective. Because they love it so much you can put it in a spot where you see ants. They will swarm it and make a big enough trail that you can track them back to where they are getting in and put some there, or even outside of the house where they are coming in.
I don't know if it actually kills the nest (they are supposed to carry the borax laden sugar water back to the nest for Maximum Carnage, but honestly all I care is that they stop tracking across the floor and getting into the cat food). It is mostly harmless, your cats will ignore it (though it is sticky, so if they step on it or drag their tail through it you'll want to wash it off for them - warm water is all it takes).
Good luck..
EDIT - Pretty sure this is the commercial version of RichVR's boric acid trap above. You can find it in any hardware/home store.
Last edited by BlueJackalope; 07-17-2012 at 08:49 AM.
Thanks for all the advice. My biggest concern is finding a way to treat the problem without hurting our cats. But I'd also love to figure out how in the world they're getting in. Insects have never gotten into the house before (except earwigs which came in through the dryer vent which we fixed), so it's a mystery how they've come to be here.
I don't supposed those CSI lights will show the ant pheromone trail will they?
Get the Terro liquid bait traps already.
You watch too much science fiction.I don't supposed those CSI lights will show the ant pheromone trail will they?
Get the Terro stuff for inside and out. It helped me with my epic ant problem, also here in Michigan, earlier this year. And when I mean epic I mean finding trails heading to a couple crumbs somewhere getting swarmed and cleaning up over a thousand individual ants.
Last edited by Nathan Phoenix; 07-17-2012 at 01:22 PM.
I did, got them all over along with the black hexagon shaped traps. How long does it take before they start dying?
Have you tried steppin' on 'em?
If you put them where the ants are swarming and they're eating it right now... you probably wont' see any more tomorrow.
These are real little ants, so I have to use my finger and a vacuum. I've released 100+ souls from their chinitous little shells.
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