Ants in my pants!

[imlad.livejournal.com]

Well, not quite :-) But in my kitchen. It appears that we have a bit of an ant infestation in our house. It's those little "honey" ants. K fought them valiantly with traps and all manner of ant destroying implements. So while we no longer have columns of ants in our bathroom and kitchen, they are still around, and nothing we do seems to work. My suspicion is that the source is outside the apartment, and destroying them here (even with the approach of having them carry various nasty poisons back to their nest) will not do the trick. Has anyone in the area had similar experiences? My feeling is that if the source is outside of my apartment, the landlord should be dealing with that - has anyone had to deal with this kind of situation?

Comments

[mermaidcafe.livejournal.com]

I haven't dealt with that, but it couldn't hurt to ask your landlord to deal. If s/he says no, then you can figure out if s/he is required to take care of it or not. But if the source is on someone else's property, then the landlord will probably say no.

Also, check your lease. When I lived in a really buggy town, my lease specifically said that anything to do with bug problems was my responsibility. If there's nothing like that in your lease, you have a much better chance of getting your landlord to do something.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Then if the spiders become a problem, you can get some birds to catch 'em.

[pjmorgan.livejournal.com]

I've found the liquid ant spray to be succesfull. Spray it underneath your sink, anywhere else you see them. Also spray along foundation and in basement. For me, just spraying it in the kitchen did the trick. Got rid of 80% pretty quickly then still a trickle for a week I guess until they all went away.

[annalauwa.livejournal.com]

i haven't seen this myself, but have heard from multiple people who did have ants that corn meal works well. they eat it and then if they drink water they explode from the pressure....
got this from a website:
if they eat the cornmeal and then drink water, the cornmeal swells up and kills them. They also carry the cornmeal to their nest, so the ants there will die as well. You can put cornmeal around outside, but you will have to replace it after it rains.

worth a try perhaps?

[livingadream.livejournal.com]

I had a pretty nasty ant problem for a while and soon found that they were walking in the front door. After a bit of research (thnx interwebz) I found that black pepper is a good way to mask scent trails. I put a 4 pack of ant baits by the door and put black pepper all around the area and we haven't seen any ants since.

If it's an outside problem - my parents put coffee grounds around the perimeter of their house and that seems to work for them.

Good luck!

[somertricky.livejournal.com]

When using the strategy of having the ants carry nasty stuff back to their lodgings, sometimes a double dose of patience is called for. We'd get black ants attacking us from front and rear, so we tossed out way too many traps at each entry point (and even a couple outside on each of the porches, right outside the doors), three or four at a time. The thru traffic was cut to a trickle in a couple of days, but we'd see a straggler every couple of days for damn close to a month.

Black pepper along the perimeter sounds good; I was thinking along the lines of cayenne myself. Otherwise the landlord (or his agents) will probably spray particularly noxious liquid around the perimeter of your house, which may not be worth it.

[amethystmoon.livejournal.com]

I'm for the method of using spray ant killer on any and all ants that you can find, and then across any entrance you think they're using to get in. I've had a few such ant infestations (my current kitchen, an old apartment, and one in my car of all places, after being parked in the back woods of NH for 2 weeks), and traps didn't work, but the spray did. Although I've never tried the more environmentally friendly options (cornmeal, borax, coffee grounds, pepper), the spray seems to work better than other chemical options.

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

Anybody know where to get diatomaceous earth?

[suzybuzz.livejournal.com]

if you can caulk any area from which you think the ants may be deriving, that helps. i had the same problem a few weeks ago. ants were crawling in our cat food. i caulked the area and moved the food. no more ants. when i moved the food back to its original spot, however, a few ants returned, but not nearly as many as i had seen before. so i think the caulking definitely improved the situation.

i talked to a guy at the hardware store and he said alot of people are complaining about ants this year due to the rain. the rain pushes the ants above the groundwater and they're all looking for refuge.