Emily will often complain about little tiny ants in our house. I never notice them, so I don't tend to do much about them. The other day she insisted that there were lots of them under our oven, and it's no wonder! When I pulled out the oven, the ground was covered with Cheerios, raisins, M&Ms, and just about anything that you can imaging a kid dropping on the floor.
We decided that instead of just plugging their hole we would try to take care of them with homemade ant bait made from borax. Apparently borates are very poisonous to insects, but completely harmless to us. The bait would have been better with roach powder (which is just boric acid), because the texture would be a lot finer than the laundry booster I used. We tried making a mixture of corn syrup and borax, but they showed no interest. What really got them was borax and peanut butter. We haven't noticed any more ants lately, so maybe it just worked!
That is an interesting looking way to get rid of ants. Isn't it amazing the things lurking under appliances? That is part of the reason I like drop-in ranges. Good luck keeping the ants out of the house once you kill off this batch. I think a line of borax around where they come in is supposed to help.
ReplyDeleteWe use borax for our ants too. I never thought about mixing it with peanut butter - I'll have to try that. We had a guy come look at our oven a couple years ago, and he looked under the oven - SO embarrassing!!
ReplyDeleteWe actually have had professional pest control ever since we moved into our house, so I doubt doing anything more outside will really help. We are trying to decide whether to keep the pest control, since as we plant more food-bearing plants in our yard there are getting to be fewer places that they can spray.
ReplyDelete