I’ve had ants in my home at various times (including the new home we’ve moved into) and I’ve tried all of the various grocery store solutions like Raid and Combat discs (aside, it just struck me how manufacturers like to name their products in such a way as to make controlling ants sound like a full-on war). None of those things ever really worked well for me. What works amazingly well is this simple little recipe:
1.5 cups water
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp boric acid (available in the pharmacy section; poisonous if taken internally or inhaled)
Bring to boil. Let cool. Pour liquid into bottle caps and place bottle caps in the path of the ants. Typically, the sugar will attract zillions of ants and the problem will appear to get much, much worse for a day or two. Then you will find lots of dead ants to wipe up. Then no more ants. Has worked every time that I’ve used it.
Make sure that if you end up with extra liquid and you store it, that you clearly label it as poison. I use my Brother label maker on the largest font and put skull and bones icons all over it.
I thought boric was basically safe to humans?
Check out wikipedia – kind of a confusing statement about the toxicity of boric acid. Regardless, I’m not going to put any on my sandwich. 🙂
You don’t really need to add water and boil it all together. It would be sufficient to mix the sugar and the boric acid powder together, and leave it out as a powdered bait. The sugar attracts the ants, they walk around in the boric acid which kills them. In fact, you really don’t even need the sugar, if you can get the boric acid powder in places that ants walk.
BTW, boric acid powder is an old cockroach remedy, you just scatter it behind your stove and fridge, or other places where roaches crawl. Works like a charm.
@Charles : actually no. If you use pure boric acid, you’ll quickly kill the insects that get in contact with it, but not much. With Marc’s recipe, the ants won’t be killed right away, they’ll rather come en masse to collect what they’ve identified as food (the sugared liquid) to bring it back to the anthill, effectively poisoning the whole nest. A slower, but effective WMD for ants.
For those of us who are too lazy to DIY, you can pick up Terro Liquid Ant Killer at home and gardening stores like Loews and Home Depot or online at Amazon. It’s the same thing–simple syrup (sugar+water+heat) and boric acid (Borax).
The beauty of it is, as padawan noted, it doesn’t kill the ants right away. It lets them bring many doses of the poison to the queen, first.
However, I’d argue it’s best to leave the stuff around for more than a day or two. 1-2 days might be enough to kill the queen and starve the current ant population, but you need a week or two to kill off the next generation as well.
Oh yeah, and “zillions of ants” is a moderate way of putting it. Sugar and borax traps will attract so many ants that you’ll almost want to vomit. They will literally start pouring out of cracks in the wall.