Ants are crawling around our house
 

We live near a forrest and have lots of ants crawling around our house.
We've bought some ant devices that are supposed to lure them into the trap and kill them, but they keep coming.

Does anybody know how to solve the ant problem or do I have to continue buying those ant traps...? :(

I've got a real ant problem in my bathroom downstairs. They come from underneath the toilet and just... roam around. I've tried coating the space between the toilet and floor with different poisons, but it's like they just eat that stuff for breakfast. However, I have noticed that there are a more spiders (omg eww) around and underneath their webs are... ANT CARCASSES! (lol)

My suggestion is to get a spider. They will eat all surrounding ants.

The term "ant devices" conjures some interesting imagery. Anyway, I've had problems with ants in my apartment, and I've found the best thing is buying some spray and making sure to coat around the windows, baseboards, etc. You're never going to get rid of them all, but hopefully you can get rid of most of them.

If they're the tiny little sugar ants, the only way to get rid of them is with a bait/poison. Spraying them just makes them move the colony. They come in seeking moisture. Go online to sites like "Do it yourself pest control" and they have ant ID guides and proceedures to get rid of different types of ants.

How do I get spiders? I can't just go out in the woods and pick up some spider and place him inside my house! :(
Spiders has to adapt to their environment...

I'm not sure if it's Filipino superstition or something, but my mom says ants in the house brings good fortune. So there's always been ants in my house, my old one too. There were no ants in my apartments. I was not very fortunate there.

I believe...

A simple and amusing trick is to place a small, thin ring of something sweet, such as strawberry jelly, on the floor. In the middle of the ring, place some baking soda.

The ants will be drawn to the jelly, en masse. But baking soda takes on the scent of foods around it, so when the ants eat through and over the jelly, they'll continue and consume the baking soda as well. This causes their tiny, little thoraces to burst, effectively killing each ant that flocks to the jelly.

All that remains to be done is to sweep or mop up the remnants.

I've also heard that liberally applying hair spray to the foundation of one's house will go a long way toward deterring ants and other invaders. I did it once and it seems to help. It's also quite effective at withering clinging ivy.

I had a big problem with ants too. I bought those stupid bait traps too, trust me, they dont work. The trick for me was finding out where their nest was. If you can find where they're coming from, you can flood them out. I found their nest in a corner of a planter box and flooded the little bastards out with boiling water. It took a couple trips with the kettle, but they still havent come back, and that was a year ago ;) I read about it on the net, and figured, what do i have to lose? Who knew it would work!

Wow...I wish I'd known about that before I had to tear my whole damn room apart for the past three weeks. Must've been 10,000 of those little bastards.

I have a sugar ant problem. My finger seems to be my best weapon against them. But no prevention techniques. I would suggest going to the source and killing off their nest, if you can find it.

Funny this thread should pop when our house just got an ant problem with the window-sill in our kitchen two days ago.

Anytime we have ever had an ant problem we have used Raid - Liquid Ant Killer. All you do is leave a little puddle of the stuff where you see most of the ants and they'll take it back to their ant hill killing off the queen and the entire colony.

The stuff works fast too, usually a day or so. I hope it helps :).

The ant traps never seemed to work when I still lived at home. I typically used ant spray around the frame of the front door, and the ants seemed to stop entering temporarily. I currently live on the second floor, so I don't experience ant problems unless it's winter with the heater on.

I get ants in my basement every summer, and this is much more effective than the store bought traps.

Another similar way to kill ants is to put about a centimeter of orange juice into a shallow cup and just leave it lying around. The ants go in, can't come out.

Ant traps are surprisingly ineffective, in my experience. The theory is that they go in smelling delicious food, then carry it back to the nest where the rest of the colony discovers it is actually delicious poison! The ants seem to prefer the real food, though.

One good way to foil them is to erase all their scent trails. If you know where the ants are coming from and where they keep congregating, wipe the intervening areas with simple soap and water to wash off their trails. Ants depend on those trails for food runs, and otherwise they're stuck having to forage around blindly, which is your cue to stomp them.

I'd love to do the baking soda trick, but there's a good chance the dog will come in and eat the whole works when we're not looking. >_<

I used to have an ant problem I just took the vacuum cleaner and sucked them all up.

from what i've heard it's always a good idea to avoid excess moisture. like most animals, ants can survive longer without food than without water so they tend to flock around the latter. so no leaving glasses with water in them etc. another thing is their hardly visible trails of scent they leave. get rid of the ants, wash the trail, and it should help quite a bit. other than those, i'm probably not gonna be much help.

At least dogs are able to fart, and thus will not explode. :lolsign:

I find that the best way to get rid of ants are products that you use outdoors. Little traps that catch ants and such inside your house are useless. If you catch a few ants in one place that's not going to keep other ants from wandering elsewhere.

If you live in a house, there are two products that I would recommend. This you sprinkle around the perimeter of your house. There's also sprays with which you do the same; but I cannot remember the brand and title of the one we used to use.

We have a lot of ants around here, too. These products most generally keep them out of the house for the duration of the warm seasons.

A fun way to get rid of the little buggers is to place some sweet thing (Jelly, as Crash suggested, works well) and then just wait for the ants to swarm it. Once they do, you have two options. One, put a ring of lighter fluid around the jelly, and light that bitch up. They'll be trapped, and hilarity will ensue. They may not all die, though, which brings me to my next hilarious way to destroy ants. Instead of simply making a RING-O-FIRE, just douse the entire thing in lighter fluid. Throw a match in, and watch the ants go POP!

My mother's preferred method of killing a colony was to put out either Cream of Wheat (might've been grits though, I can't remember) for the ants to take. The ants would feed the stuff to the queen, and the queen would die because the stuff expands in the digestive tract. Colony destroyed. =D

My grandma from South America would drill a hole in the middle of the nest, pour a gallon of gasoline, and light it on fire.

I think it worked ok. It exploded once I remember. Sureshot way though.

you could always just keep your floors and counters clean so they won't have a reason to come into your house in the first place.

back at my other house there was a very large ant colony in the back yard; a big sand hill of them. my mom would mop the floor with vinegar in the water and that deters them. also, if you put cyan pepper outside your door they won't come in because it burns them if they come in contact with it.

I'd also suggest looking around your property for any noteably large ant hills. put the poison baits around the hill so they won't have to keep coming into your house and even use something like Trounce [or any type of bug poison spray] on the hill itself and that should eventually make them GTFO. :'D

by far the best ant killer is Terro ant killer. here's how it works:

it's like a very sweet goop that ants love to eat. it has something in it that slowly kills ants. tons of ants flock around it and eat it up and bring some back to their colony to feed the queen. the queen, as well as all of the other ants, die.

i used to have a huge ant problem (there were literally huge colonies of ants all over our house). we used ant traps, which the ants never went in; spray, which didn't permanantly solve anything; and naturally we had tons of spiders, which couldn't handle all the ants. then we got Terro and within a month, our house was ant free.

You could call up a pest control service, or go to one of those DIY pest control places that sell you the chemicals that aren't as strong as professional ones, but better than what you get at like Wal-Mart. You'll probably need one of those pump-spray tanks though. I find once they blast those chemicals on the ground, there are no more bugs, except dead ones that turn up.