Non repellent antkiller

[Sclass]

Anyone have a suggestion for non repellent ant killer?

I have argentine ants in the house. I used Terro bait and wiped out one group living in the bathroom wall. However the gene pool living in the kitchen doesn't seem to eat the bait.

Terro was extremely effective if the swarmed on it and ate it.

Talked to a door to door salesman for pest control and he said I need non repellent spray or else I'll split the colony as they flee to more pleasant locations in the house. He said I need a poison they'll get all over them then bring home to the nest. The story made sense so I'd like to put it into action.

Anyone have any experience with such a product?

[EMJ]

No personal experience, but this might be helpful:
Ants in the Home
http://extension.colostate.edu/topic-ar ... ome-5-518/

[IlliniDave]

You're in for a battle. I've had the best luck with Ortho Home Defense Max and persistence. Argentines have networks of colonies, so the "carry back to colony" poisons will only fix part of the problem (as you've seen). You might be able to kill off a pod currently hanging out in your home with them, but too often a new group will replace them (dunno if they leave residual trails or what). I've had to take the battle to them in my yard to keep them at bay.

In my area the problem is worst in the fall/winter once the ground gets saturated and they start roaming to find dry ground. Once they get up into walls they can roam the whole structure, and seem to like to follow plumbing (leads to water). I spend the early part of the fall spraying around openings (doors, windows) and spraying them directly when I see trails near the house. I do use baits inside the house, they seem to like the terro brand for "sweet-feeding" ants. That stuff will knock them back but never really wipes them out. Only in the last 2 years augmenting with the Ortho and attacking them outside have I had a relatively ant-free winter.

It's possible you have a different species in your kitchen. Try mixing some grease with the Terro and see if they'll eat that. Peanut butter, butter, etc., maybe bacon grease.

Good luck.

[GandK]

Ants do not like sage. Fresh is best.

[Sclass]

Mixed some fat drippings in with the Terro. They're going for it.

I left the giant colony alone on my porch last week while I saw them devour some owl's leftover dinner. I was cool with it as long as they didn't visit the kitchen. Big mistake. Looks like the group found a crack in the wall.

I once had this stick of ant chalk from China. Got it from a landlady long long ago. It worked well on ants. They walked through it and then they just curled up and died. Never scared them away. They just kept marching into it like lemurs over a cliff till I'd have half a cup of dead ants to sweep up off the floor a day later. Wow. I need to find some of that again. It looks like it is sold on eBay from China along with the cheap iPhone cases.

[jennypenny]

I use powdered dishwasher soap (like Cascade), but last year we were overrun and I had to resort to using what Dave suggested above. We used it inside and out for a week and it worked.

[tommytebco]

Borax is supposed to be good. I have used it for roaches. Haven't had roach problems since .

I haven't had ant problems for a long time. I Used "TERRO" the last time and it worked fine for small ants that had discovered a route to the table top.

[Riggerjack]

Fipronil is the active ingredient in front line.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fipronil

Ants are attracted to grease and/or sweets. Dipping a toothpick in frontline, stabbing in your bait, and placing a bait station on every foraging trail is the recommended solution. There are DIY baitstations online, or you can make your own. The point being to limit the size of critter that can eat your bait. While toxicity in mammals isn't an issue, it's always a good idea to limit dispersal of toxins. And this stuff does a number on all bugs.

Follow up treatment of your yard with an insect growth inhibitor should help prevent a reinfestation.

Good luck!

[Tyler9000]

+1 to borax.

We had an ant problem a few weeks ago, and the little buggers ignored the normal traps. DW took an upside-down plastic butter container lid and mixed borax with powdered sugar on one half and a little bit of tuna on the other, placing the bait at the trail source. Apparently they favored the protein. They were gone within a day or two.

It was also a good reminder that I was behind schedule on my external bug spray routine. As Dave mentioned, I spray Ortho Home Defense (or similar) around the external foundation/doors/windows/cracks every few months and it does a pretty good job of keeping the wildlife out.

[Sclass]

And the fight goes on.

I've learned more than I want to know about argentine ants. Wikipedia has an interesting entry. I'm basically smack dab in the middle of a super colony stretching from San Diego to San Francisco. Distributed queens and cooperating interlinked nests.

Terro took out the kitchen invasion and beat the ants back to the garden. The thick trails of ants in the garden thinned out after feeding on more Terro I left outside. But the colonies are distributed. I went out to dump the trash today on the other side of the house and the can was covered in ants. A river of ants was flowing in from yet another area of the yard.

I doused the trails with dish soap and water to see if I could figure out where the nests were. I watched for awhile (ahhh to be retired) and I found out they were emerging from three different holes and a tree stump. They were running with their larvae and queens. Apparently they don't like getting flooded with soap.

So I really drowned them in soap water. It's all I had around besides spider killer.

The distributed colonies seem pretty small. I killed thousands of ants as they evacuated the holes. After awhile they stopped coming up. Lots of big queens...yes, multiple queens in each nest.

Fun. I'll have to hit the store and look for fipronil. Ordered the chalk on eBay. No more mr. Nice guy.

JP did you just sprinkle something like cascade on the ground?

[Tyler9000]

I also had a huge outdoor colony last year -- every time I would attack one mound, another would immediately spring up. Go to the hardware store and look for a bag of granules that you can spread over an area and water in (this one is inexpensive and worked well for me). That should fix the problem pretty quickly.

[jacob]

We often get our house invaded by tiny ants(*) after a series of big rains. Usually the ants go away on their own again but not this time. Apparently they didn't like the ant traps we put out. What finally worked was a very fine and broad dusting of borax(**) (no sugar mixed in) all over the areas and trails they walked on inside. If the layer is thin enough, they aren't repelled but will walk right over it and get it on their legs. If they stop and turn around, the layer is too thick. They'll ingest later when they're cleaning up. That worked! After 3-5 days all the ants were gone.

(*) about 1.5mm long, dunno what they're called. We also have black ants about 2-3 times bigger but they stay outside.
(**) Same as we use for laundry detergent.

[cmonkey]

Those little tiny ants are collectively called grease ants, but there are many varieties. It'd be hard to figure out what they are. They nest in damp/rotten wood. I have found a nest in every single window I've ripped out so far. We never really found them in the house though.

We had a little ant oregon trail leading up the side of our foundation last week, right behind the siding. On the kitchen side. No ants in the kitchen. There's no way that part of the house is damp there are no windows. In any case, wasp spray did the trip. I believe ants follow a pheromone trail and the wasp spray destroyed that trail along with the ants.

[Sclass]

Just to follow up, I've kicked butt on the ants. I learned a lot about them. I must have counted ten nests in the yard. I could tell when I'd kill them off the ants would seem to come from another place. Networked with members going in between colonies as little as ten feet away from one another.

I did it with Terro bait to thin them out. Then I went after the remaining trails with ant chalk from eBay. Chinese mystery pesticide only to be handled with gloves and a p100 mask.

And the occasional douse with dish detergent and water to flood them out of their nests.

It is getting quiet out there. No more ant highways along the walls and patio. Ants in the house are long gone.

Now I just have to stay alert for future invasions. It was pretty clear the prior residents of the home just didn't care and let them establish huge colonies in the yard.

We had the same problem with black widow spiders...never have I seen so many black widows in one place. I cleaned them out by killing them one by one over a week. Now I just monitor for new webs.