Kara mentioned in an earlier post that we were having some trouble with tiny black ants in our kitchen. Seems like a lot of people do during the spring, so I just want to put in a plug for the borax formula we mixed up to bait the ants in our kitchen. If you have ants that flock to sweet stuff, I’ll bet this will work for you too.
All I did is boil a cup of water and add 1/3 cup of sugar and 1 tablespoon of borax. Then I placed about a teaspoon of this mixture on each of several foil-covered notecards (I’ve seen people talk about using baby food lids, but we didn’t have any) all over the kitchen.
The next morning the entire kitchen was crawling with ants. There were dozens on the counters and lined up in circles all around each of the puddles of poisoned liquid. By the time we came home that evening the ants were nearly gone, and two days later all I see is the occasional ant heading to or from one of the bait puddles. The kitchen is safe for cooking once again.
This totally works and is much cheaper than commercial traps, so I highly recommend it if you have little ants. Apparently borax takes several hours to kill ants, and the workers will drink liquid and regurgitate it to feed others, so this is a reasonable way to wipe out the whole colony in a short time.
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Borax works by getting in all the nook and crannies of their exoskeletons and eating them up from the outside in. If they eat it, I suppose it’s pretty nasty too. But usually, you want to put the power out where they’ll walk through it, track it back to the nests and get it on the bodies of their relatives for joint-destroying pain and agony.
The ants suck up the sugar water with the borax, take it back to their evil cave and regurgitate it to their buddies, so they all end up partaking in the poisoned nutrition. The ratio of borax to sugar in this recipe allows the ants time to take that poison back to their friends so they all die, and you don’t have to deal with hundreds of ant carcasses on your kitchen counter. So, basically, it functions the same way. And mixing it with sugar water means the cat won’t be interested and if she was, she wouldn’t be able to take in enough of it to harm her.
When I was at UMBC, I had loads of ants in my dormroom. I sprayed them and had traps and they all ended up collapsing not far from where they were which made for annoying clean-up.
I knew about the external effects of borax so I was a little skeptical about the water solution, but apparently it’s a pretty potent chemical toxin for the ants as well. I would’ve put the powder out, but we had concerns about the cat getting into it and then grooming herself.
Makes sense. I guess it eats ‘em from the inside out just as well as from the outside in! The best article on killing bugs (roaches anyway) is from The Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_019.html).
“Now, you may regard borax as “pansy-ass,” my boy, but that is because you are young and ignorant and have not yet grasped the subtleties of Total Insect Warfare, which requires fanatical dedication. You must mix up oodles of this stuff and apply it with the enthusiasm of Robert S. McNamara dumping Agent Orange on the Mekong Delta. Pour it in a continuous line along the walls. Put an extra dose under sinks and around kitchen cabinets. Hell, fill your damned house to a depth of one foot with the stuff. The little bastards will die piteously, I promise.
Incidentally, should you also be happen to be troubled by rats, I have here an ingenious formula for inducing rat death: Mix equal parts cement and flour. Place a pan of this powder out next to a pan of water. The rats eat the cement, then they drink the water, and by the next morning their bowels have turned to concrete. Sadistic, eh? I knew you’d love it.”
Dad
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