Cheap Argentine ant killer

[Sclass]

I have Argentine ant colonies in my walls. Big colonies with multiple queens I suspect.

I got tired of buying Terro for $4 a vial. Especially now. For some reason my ants don’t touch it anymore. They test it and walk off. I tried some other baits. $20 worth of alternate brands and no luck. If they don’t eat it they don’t poison their colony.

They eat everything else except ant bait.

I watched some YouTube and noticed people mix 20 Mule Team Borax with sugar and they say it kills the ants at a fraction the price of Terro. The Terro MSDS says it’s basically sugar with 2% Borax. I have a lifetime supply of borax from my bronze brazing project. $4 a box.

I got a little too smart and picked up some Aldi pancake syrup for $1.50. 100% high fructose corn syrup. It seemed easier to mix up. The ants didn’t want it.

At this point I was pretty frustrated.

A few days ago I broke down and raided our organic granulated sugar bag. Mixed 5% borax powder with some water and sugar to make syrup. Very roughly measured 20 pinches of sugar to one pinch of borax. Add some water to dissolve it. Laid it out on a piece of aluminum foil. The ants devoured it. They loved it. Two days later they’re gone. There is bit of bait left but no more ants.

Note to self. Don’t eat high fructose corn syrup. The ants know something. I had all but convinced myself that if they didn’t want pancake syrup they wouldn’t want sugar. Wrong.

I wonder why they eat my sugar water/borax mix but they pass the Terro? It’s an infinitely better deal than Terro because my ants eat it. My best guess is that it’s overused in my neighborhood. Like Victor rat traps are 100% ineffective on my rats.

Flux. Borax laundry booster. Pure borax crystal. Twenty pinches of sugar:1 pinch of borax. Add water till it becomes a thick syrup.

[Lemur]

This protocol will work on roaches as well.

[jacob]

You can also just spread the borax in a very thin layer on the floor. The layer has to be so thin (think dust) they walk over it rather than around it.

[IlliniDave]

One of the great boons that kept me warm during my first subzero nights in decades was knowing that, at least for a while, those ants are not part of my life any more. I had to combine baits with relentless spraying of trails outside during the summer to keep them in check. I also learned to be better about getting up leaf littler in the late fall--seems to be one of their nesting sites of choice over the winter. Wish I'd have known about a homemade alternate to Terro. I had similar experiences with it, initially the ants would go for it voraciously, but they'd eventually lose interest. I never did eradicate them, but in time i kept most of the indoor excursions in check.

[Sclass]

I’m not sure how well this is going. The ants are back and they no longer want my ant killer.

This is really frustrating. They seem to eat it then disappear a few days. Then they reappear. I wonder if I’m dealing with different sub colonies.

I mixed the most recent batch up with regular white sugar. Not organic granulated sugar. Could they actually tell the difference? They don’t want it. Time to go back to the organic sugar.

[Jean]

have you tried protein based bait? like mixing borax with quark.

[IlliniDave]

I’m not sure how well this is going. The ants are back and they no longer want my ant killer.

This is really frustrating. They seem to eat it then disappear a few days. Then they reappear. I wonder if I’m dealing with different sub colonies.

I mixed the most recent batch up with regular white sugar. Not organic granulated sugar. Could they actually tell the difference? They don’t want it. Time to go back to the organic sugar.

I read something somewhere that as their trail pheromone ages it changes their foraging behavior--they'll stop foraging along older trails. Maybe just relocating the bait somewhere new will rekindle their interest? Argentines are omnivores so you could also try mixing in some bacon grease and/or protein like Jean suggested.

[Stahlmann]

I mixed the most recent batch up with regular white sugar. Not organic granulated sugar. Could they actually tell the difference? They don’t want it. Time to go back to the organic sugar.

These millennial ants and their sense of entitlement

[chenda]

These millennial ants and their sense of entitlement

[Sclass]

I tried the protein theory out a few weeks ago with negative results. Tried butter, mayonnaise, egg whites and pork fat. They didn’t want it. I’m wondering if they just want water. We’ve had to cut back on our lawn watering and it’s very dry now. I think they’re going after the water left in the shower stall.

[theanimal]

Thanks for this. I have some ants getting into one of the exterior corners by my front entrance. I did as @sclass suggested and set out some sugar/borax paste on tin foil. I didn't see anything but DW says she saw some ants eating it and dying. Other ants took the dead ones back into their colony. So far today, no ants. It is sunny and warm, which usually means lots of ant activity. We'll see, I guess. The paste did attract a lot of flies this morning, so I ended up removing it.

ETA: One week later and still no ants.

[Sclass]

I think I was adding too much sugar.

I tried one pinch of borax, one pinch of sugar dissolved in a tablespoon of water. I basically reduced the sugar by 90%.

My problem before was they ignored it. They’d taste it and walk away. I thought it needed a lot to make it like syrup. But recently I’ve been making this light sugar version and saturating little blocks of kitchen sponge with it. They climb all over the sponges and drink up the solution. It’s thinner but the fact that they eat it is more important than it’s ease of handling.

I think these ants have developed a fear of over saturated sugar solutions. Possibly this occurred after too much conventional ant bait use. If ants eat it the results are catastrophic for them. I may have eliminated all the ants who like super sweet sugar water. It was getting really frustrating watching them taste the syrup and walk off.

Now they’re feasting again. Luckily they aren’t able to discriminate between borax or no borax.

[Sclass]

So I came up with my best bait yet. I wiped out the last colony in my kitchen. These ladies were really picky. They just didn’t want my light sugar/water/ borax solution. Apparently I had multiple groups living in the house. They had clearly different tastes for bait. The last one in the kitchen seemed to want food scraps we washed off plates that collected in the drain screen.

It gave me an idea. I noticed they were particularly interested in a hunk of sugar raised doughnut. I made a solution of borax and water (roughly 5% by volume) and saturated a sugar raised doughnut in it. They must like the yeast, eggs or lightly sweetened exterior. They climbed all over it and got bloated on only the fluid. They left the doughnut.

Pretty soon they got that intoxicated behavior where they break ranks and stop marching. They lose discipline and just start hanging around not moving. A day of that and now they’re all gone.

[Sclass]

Ant update.

Well I had some freakish mutant Argentine ants. I had one colony left in my kitchen wall and I couldn’t get them to take borax infused bait. I’ve been trying to bait them for weeks. I even studied what they were eating in my trash and I poisoned it with borax and they wouldn’t touch it afterwards. They know what borax is. I determined empirically that they can detect amounts as low as 2% by volume. Evolution in action. Everyone in my area uses Terro and it worked too well. These ants are the omicron variant of Argentine ants.

Tried boric acid powder and it works. They wouldn’t eat it in bait but they did walk over it. Thank you Jacob. No more ants. Not to be confused with borax. Boric acid is the product of mixing HCl with Borax. Super fine crystals the ants walk over and somehow ingest. I think they taste it to see if it’s safe to walk over. My ants tried to avoid walking on it but I did as the post says and spread it around thinly with an artist’s brush. Looks like powdered sugar unlike the borax laundry booster that is more like table salt.

Three days of this and they’re gone. Finally.

You can also just spread the borax in a very thin layer on the floor. The layer has to be so thin (think dust) they walk over it rather than around it.

Oddly it was hard to get this stuff at my local Lowes, Home Depot, Walmart and Ace Hardware. Even 99c Only didn’t have it and they usually carry the ghetto solutions to everything. It’s like everyone in my area wants some well marketed aerosol spray instead of the old fashioned remedy.

[jacob]

Super fine crystals the ants walk over and somehow ingest. I think they taste it to see if it’s safe to walk over. My ants tried to avoid walking on it but I did as the post says and spread it around thinly with an artist’s brush. Looks like powdered sugar unlike the borax laundry booster that is more like table salt.

It's my understanding that they walk over it and then ingest it while trying to clean it off themselves/each other. They have no incentive to eat it otherwise unlike the sugary mixes. So the effect is indirect. I use standard laundry booster and sprinkle it randomly from 2-3ft up to disperse it. The strategy is more like area denial with cluster mines than barriers. I want to make my space a sucky place to live [for ants] rather than fence it off. Surface density varies but in many places, it's thin enough to walk on. I've never seen anyone [ant] stop until the reach a place of high concentration at which point it's too late, it's already on them. I'm probably going to ant hell.

[Sclass]

No ants this morning. I am so used to waking up to a counter top full of ants. Not today. Amazing. $3 ant and roach powder. I laugh as I see the pest control trucks outside my neighbors’ places. Spraying…yuck. Not to mention hundreds of dollars. The general rule in my suburb is a truck visit if any kind - rat man, AC tech, Plumber, electricians is $100 just to show up and then it goes up from there. It feels great to keep the ant man out of my pocket.

I’ve been reading about Argentine ant colonies.

I cannot help but see some parallels with the society around me.

The new invasive ants are very successful. They’ve put reproductive pressure on the indigenous ants. No, they’ve just wiped them out. And along with the local ants the population of reptiles has changed. Lizards who refuse to eat Argentines are long gone. The one I see eating them has exploded in number. A door to door pest controller told me a year back he knew I had ants because my walls had lizards. There’s only one kind of lizard now. There used to be dozens of variants.

The success of the ants has a lot to do with their colony structure. Multiple queens. Nests that cooperate. No war. The mega colony supposedly goes from Mexico to the Oregon border. You take ants from neighboring nests and they commingle. They share and work together. They couch surf at their cousins’ place as they spread. Their queens split off and start new cells. Gone are the ants of my youth where we’d collect one group together in bottles and dump them on a neighboring hill and watch them fight. These Argentine ants don’t fight. If food gets thin they split the nest and spread.

Not to get all political and lock up this thread. When I look back I can see some really powerful collaborations I’ve been a part of like open source engineering and non proprietary connectivity protocols that really exploded despite not single-mindedly pursuing commercial dominance. Groups exploded and ushered others helplessly into history.

Argentine invasive ants are seen as this ecological scourge in California. Maybe it’s just a better way.