Comment by hellbannedguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hellbannedguy | Hacker News Reader

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I've had a slightly irritating problem with ants this past year---considering everything else.

They were using electrical cables (Romex) as a highway to my house. They were also using the spaces between wood to gain entry.

Cleanliness did help, but there were times where I gave up. They just kept coming over the same routes no matter how festidious I got. One time they were eating the coating off a dropped Ibuprofen pill.

I bought the ant traps. For a few months they worked like magic. Then the ants walked right past the traps. It's almost like they knew not to go into the white houses?

I think insects are much more intelligent than we give them credit for.

What did work, or I just got lucky, is finding the openings they were coming through, and blocking off the access, and as much as I didn't want to spray Raid, I did. I didn't spray it all over though. I used a small amount directed to the point of entry. No more than a few sq. inches of spray.

So far it has reduced the number of ants, but I wouldn't be suprised if they were holding a meeting right under me right now, looking to find new entry points to my house though?

I had some very tiny ones actually walk the threads of a sealed peanut butter jar lid to get into it. I, of course, found this after I had eaten the sandwich. Extra protein that day, I suppose.

Anyway, Terro liquid ant bait has worked very reliably for me on ants like these. It is essentially a borax and sugar mixture that the ants take into their crop and return it to the nest. Eventually they feed it to the queen, stopping the flow of eggs. The stuff in the white houses usually kills them too quickly -- you want them to live and give it to the other ants in the colony.

One caveat here is that, for some types of ants (Pharaoh), their colony will splinter if it is stressed. So one colony may turn into many colonies, each with a queen, at the first sign of danger. Using liquid baits on these types of ants will actually make your problem worse.

If you go with Terro, resist the urge to do anything to the ants while they are going to town on the bait. It's going to look bad, but they need to return to the colony.

Another solution, if you want to find all of the open spaces in your house, is to puff diatomaceous earth into these spaces. It's pulverized diatoms and looks and feels like talcum powder to humans. To insects, though, it is like walking across glass and acts as a mechanical insecticide.

Both of these options are relatively non-toxic to humans and pets.

Terro has worked well for me on the east coast, but was pretty unimpressive in southern California. I assumed it was probably the decentralized Argentine megacolony thing, but we could conceivably have had splintering colonies. The only things that sort of worked were physical barriers and tightly sealing all our food. We even had an incident with a peanut butter jar, though making sure to screw the lid down seems to have prevented repeats. It was an old, porous house, so really blocking them was tough, and we never fully succeeded. We were convinced we had multiple colonies inside our walls.

One trick with Terro: the liquid can be messy if you're not careful. Honestly it seems to wander out: maybe ants are tracking it out? Anyway, it helps to sit the thing inside a ziploc bag, with a bridge of paper towel or something to help the ants find it. It makes cleanup way easier.

It's also possible that the formula they used has changed -- my bottles are several years old now.

The stuff that I used was a small bottle with waxed cardboard "targets" to place it on. You can use waxed paper as well, and I've never had a problem with it running out onto the floor.

That is fascinating. Growing up we called these sugar ants or kitchen ants. I can't read the article but I assume this is similar.

Do you know why they are averse to diatomaceous earth? They are so small I would not have thought they would experience a tactile aversion to a material. Nature is so neat.

Edit: I see now. It's not an aversion. It sticks to them and get into their joints. Interesting.

Yes, the powder cuts their exoskeleton and they perish from dehydration. It sounds like an awful way to go, but I'll do it if that's what it takes to keep them out of my kitchen.

As for diatomaceous earth, it works best in dry places. If it gets wet they can walk right over it without issue, or it will just wash away in the rain. It's also an ingredient in toothpaste and is included in animal feed to allegedly kill parasites. The research on that seems to be propped up by those invested in selling the stuff, though, so take that with a grain of salt.

Nature is really quite incredible. This blew my mind when I saw it, and it unravels a lot of the mystery behind ant locomotion: https://i.imgur.com/7Zh6Im5.gif -- It's so simple, but it works amazingly well.

> mystery behind ant locomotion: https://i.imgur.com/7Zh6Im5.gif

This is awesome. They walk like us, but instead of two legs they use two tripods.

We use DE in our chicken coops as a treatment against mites.

I can see that being useful since it's external. The things that I saw and questioned were feeding it to cows to kill internal parasites.

> Then the ants walked right past the traps. It's almost like they knew not to go into the white houses?

They leave trail of pheromones when they go back with food. If ants go somewhere but never return - this path won't have any pheromones and other paths will get more appealing over time.

There are even algorithms for solving hard problems in programming based on that :)

> They leave trail of pheromones when they go back with food. If ants go somewhere but never return - this path won't have any pheromones and other paths will get more appealing over time.

Most traps do not kill the ants on contact. Ants are supposed to take whatever is in the trap and bring it back to the colony.

Knowing that scent plays into how they alert other ants, I use a hand held vacuum to clean them up. They keep coming this instead of hiding.

I don't know if this works on all ants, but try a line of cinnamon. Ants won't walk over the line so we used to use it around antholes at the base of walls.

That helped us a lot as a kid!

Good luck, hope it helps!

We burn cinnamon roots (is that what they are called?) in small bowls to avoid this problem during summer. Might be worth giving a shot. The smoke coming out of the bow, if it doesn't fly away immediately, will hide the pheromones. It also help us reduce mosquitos as well, but I don't know why that works.

The pieces of dried curled cinnamon bark we buy for cooking are usually called cinnamon sticks, of that's what you mean by the "roots".

Cinnamon spice is actually a bark. Unless you're literally referring to the bark in which ignore this.

Yes, they have a navigation council(NAVCO) and a security council(OPSEC) at loggerheads over a new proposed route. The queen really doesnt care and has left governance to the council. All she wants is food supplies to not drop.

So your RAID murder spree has caused quite a few problems.

Needless to say, everyone in the colony is feeling a little antsy.

Instead of trying to keep them out, consider giving them an alternative. I put small piles of sugar outside of my house in the hopes that they won't need to go exploring for food. So far it has greatly reduced (but not eliminated) masses of ants invading my kitchen all summer.

The risk is you give them the fuel to breed, creating more ants for the future.

I'm not really into the idea of just killing everything that annoys me.

I've used diatomaceous earth with good results for various things I don't want in my house. I don't mind sharing my home with spiders and the like. But fleas are not welcome. And the previous homeowners planted some lovely peonies outside their hundred year old home. So ants. Lots of ants. They weren't after anything in our house, just happened to wander inside because their favorite plants were just on the other side of the wall.

I also keep one or two of these on hand at all times: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#:~:text=The%20cat%20(Fel.... Very helpful for the handful of creepy crawlies that make their way in. The older model we have is incredibly effective. The one we purchased last year isn't as efficient unfortunately.

You remind me of a story my grandpa would tell me. One time he was getting off a bus and he saw a woman a few yards a way throwing bread to pigeons. She was saying "oh look at all the pretty birdies. Oh pretty birdies.". Then one of the pigeons layed one thick on her eye. "@%#$ you damn birds %#&@"

Just keep donating piles and piles of sugar to the ants and leave the house for a week or go outside.

I didn't imply this

Maybe the rats scare the ants.

If they going from one spot, maybe zapping them with laser one by one until they are all dead.

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