Ants

Oh, how I despise ants! Well, I despise pretty much any unwanted creature who finds themselves in our house, but mostly ants.

The weather is beginning to warm and with it come the ants. It seems like we just got rid of them last fall when the weather began to cool? Oh wait, we did. Grrr… I guess there are really only a couple things to do about them: complain or take action. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if they would confine themselves to one area of the house, but I see them in practically every room. Okay, so it is kind of a big deal, having to put everything they’d want to get their grubby little hands on into Ziploc bags; but still, I don’t like using harsh chemicals with pets in the house. The same goes for the mice we randomly find evidence of every now and then in the garage. I don’t want to put out a poison because one of our cats likes to go out there, probably in search of said mice for a tasty snack.

Anyway, years ago I was on the internet and discovered a nifty little ant trap that would be relatively cheap and the pets would (or should, at least) stay out of. Okay, so really I’ve made a few different kinds because, depending on the ants, which the last house we lived in we had many different kinds, depends on what will attract and kill them. My favorites for the ants I knew where the colony was located was using equal parts molasses, sugar and yeast. The ants will go up to the mound and think, “Nom, nom, nom! Delicious sugary sweetness for us to devour!” But then they swallow the yeast and since they can’t fart, they explode. Another one is using equal parts jelly and borax. Same concept as the molasses, but the borax is like glass in their intestinal tract and they die a horrible and painful death. Okay, so I don’t know if it is or not, but it sounds like it would be. Equal parts Dawn dish soap (original) and water left out where they are already congregating will attract them and drown them. While it is true that ants can live two weeks under water, they can’t survive soap. It does have to be Dawn original dish soap, however, as there is something in it that attracts the ants in the first place. I’m sure adding a bit of sugar in the mixture will work if using another soap, but haven’t tried it… yet. I’ve also used baby powder and cayenne pepper around the molding in places I knew the ants had been using to come into the house with great success, both of which deter them from entering in the first place. This option is great for people morally opposed to the death of the sugar-stealing menaces.

We’ll see how successful I am in this house. Of course, before we moved in I’d simply been using ant and roach killer because, well, there were millions of them all over the kitchen and bathroom. I went through two cans of Lysol and three cans of ant spray cleaning every nook and cranny in this house before moving in, so I can only imagine how the population looks now almost a year later. Hopefully I can keep it at bay early before it reaches the stage I went through while taking the electrical plate covers off to paint a week before moving in.