Ants and How to Fight Them

Is it just me, or does it seem like we had an abundance of dragon flies this year. One morning I was walking toward the garden and there were four different varieties of dragon flies sitting on the tomato stakes taking in the scenery. Every stake had one sitting on it, and that’s a lot. My favorite is the one with the white, downy body and the black ends on all four wings - it reminds me of a WWII biplane.

A number of friends have told me that they had the worst ants this year and have asked for some guidance on what to do about it.

First of all, I don’t mind ants in the garden and in the woods but draw the line at sharing my home with them. If they keep that in mind I’ll live in peace and let them be. If they come into the house I deal with it swiftly and permanently.

And second of all, since we don’t have ants year round like some other parts of the country, we forget that they are part of our ecosystem, and when the heat summer brings them out we think we’re being invaded.

By the way, if ants have come into your home and you’ve found them swarming on something, don’t eat it – ants are really into “licking” things and their saliva is not good for you.

Being a firm believer in better living through chemistry I use a combination of home-made and store-bought chemicals and have been fairly effective at keeping them out of the house. As an aside, I’ve tried “non-toxic” or “relatively-less toxic” solutions and found that they “non-work” or “relatively-don't work”.

One of my favorite “low-toxic” solutions is oil of peppermint (2 tsp.) mixed with lemon scented ammonia (1/2 tsp.) in a quart of water, you can get both at the drugstore or a health foods store. Believe it or not, if you spray this solution around your foundation or on the window and door sills the ants will avoid going near it. The basic problem with this solution is that it doesn’t harm them, it just redirects the ants to find another way to get into the house, and believe me, they will.

I also tried sprinkling grits (plain, old grocery store grits right out of the box) around their anthills. I read somewhere that this works because they eat it and it absorbs all their internal liquids and makes them burst. And after about three applications on an anthill, to my surprise, the ants were gone.
I liked it because it was not dangerous to other animals and I happened to have a carton of grits that nobody in my house wanted to eat.

Ant cups are very effective once the ants have gotten into your house. Simply find the trails they follow and place one on the trail. The ones I prefer contain boric acid. What you want the ants to do is eat some of the poison and then take it back to the colony to share with the others, and eventually the queen. Remember that this is not a quick solution and will take up to 4 weeks to be truly effective.

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