Ants!!!!

Mumofthreeboys_2

A line of paraffin around your house - ants won't cross it (but do be careful if you smoke)!!!

Bounce sheets (tumble dryer) 101 uses: Put some by the back door or wherever they are getting in and, again, they won't cross it (so I read on this site somewhere anyway).

QueenB_3

I love this board - it's so nice to receive so many snippets of good advice. Thanks again - I really appreciate you helping me out.:heartsmil

li'l_p

We've just discovered today that we have ants indoors ...quite funny really because my OH got really freaked by them. Out came the hoover and the ant powder of course! Sitting here is a lovely clean house!

Funniest moment was when I peeked over the bannister and said "ooh, there's loads of ants up here" ...his face ws a picture until he realised what I was getting at.

paul_h

Ants... they're like a curse, especially if you have sandy soil.:mad:

The only long-term solution to ant nests I know of is to feed them with a mixture of borax powder, icing sugar and a little water to make a paste. The mixture eventually makes the queen sterile - the worker ants will feed this sugary bounty to the queen. Put dots of the mixture near to the nest/s on something non-porous and cover from the rain and top up regularly. The mixture is also environmentally friendly as you are only using tiny amounts, not squirting it everywhere.

You can also buy a made up mixture, the Nippon stuff in small tubes, but it's cheaper to make it if you can get the borax - try a dispensing chemist.

It does take a while, so perserverence is required, but it does work - you may be talking about months rather than weeks, but it is really the best way to destroy a nest completely. Once the queen is sterile, the nest will die out quickly as the workers don't live very long.

Hope this helps someone, but as I say - perseverence is required. It all depends how desperate you are...;)

TIGs

I get ants really bad in my house, you can't sit in the room without one crawling up your leg :mad:

So last year after finding they had infested my sons sandwich box i phoned a few pest control companies, i was given prices from £20 to £55 :eek: thought i'd give the £20 guy as go, within a week they'd all gone and didn't see any more ants for the rest of the year, :j :j :T :T £20 well spent.

But new year more ants have appeared managed to keep them at bay with ant powder at the minute but can see i'll be ringing the fella again in the next month or so.

PhilCCFC

We've been inundated with them over the past couple of weeks, does anyone know where you can buy Borax from these days? Our local hardware store and Chemist both have stopped stocking it.

In the meantime the Dyson is getting plenty of use!

bootman

What about when they are in your lawn??

I have loads of little piles of soil on top of the grass full of ants!!! If I pour boiling water on the grass I will kill it, I also have chickens that free range on the lawn. Typical my hens wont eat ants!!

What should I use??

C_Ronaldo

apparently chalk works, if you draw a chalk line around(if poss) your house they wont cross the line

in*the*red_6

Hello

Went shopping today and forgot to look for ant powder (getting a few of the little blighters around) so wondered if anyone had an OS alternative that gets rid of them?

Thanks

mamaoba

a 50/50 mix of icing sugar and borax sprinkled around the skirting boards get rid of garden and red ants. Also leave an unwashed jam jar outside your backdoor so they go to that rather than your kitchen counters, gradually move the jamjar further away from your house by a foot a day till it's well away. The ants'll work out food indoors = very sick ants, food outdoors = good.

Don't use the icing sugar mix around babies or toddlers for obvious reasons (the borax is not good for you !).