Ants - Updated (and a handy household tip)

So, it turns out the cure for ants (assuming they're just foraging, not living, in your house) is --- the vacuum cleaner.

The infestation in our home got pretty obnoxious, and I'd tried the vinegar and salt tricks suggested here, but succeeded only in making myself hungry for potato chips. That stuff deterred them, but only for about a day.

Then it rained really hard and it go so bad that there were probably fifty ants or more in my field of vision at any give time. So, I called the exterminator. He couldn't come for three days.

So, we hauled out the vacuum cleaner and sucked up every ant we could see, over and over for a day and a half. By the time the exterminator came, he could only find three ants in the trash can. And he told me that the vacuum cleaner is a perfectly viable treatment for ant infestations. If you break off their chain of communication, they won't know to keep sending the troops. He did a very thorough inspection and it doesn't appear that they live here; probably off in the woods somewhere behind our house.

So, go figure. It's the vacuum that did the trick.

The more you know...

Manix said:

Ha! That's funny. I hope you didn't have to pay him a truckload for that little tip!

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Actually, he didn't charge me. He did a very thorough inspection and said that their estimates are always free, even if it's gonna cost you $0 to get rid of those durn bugs.

That's a company I'll call again. And, in fact, have. I had a wasp problem three years ago that was more than I could handle on my own.

So, I've got his card (I asked him for a couple so that I could recommend them to others) and the glow of falling victim to good customer service.

Yeah, the exterminator warned me off of any bait traps - natural or otherwise.

It seemed rather simplistic when he said it, but "anything that attracts them will likely only make the problem worse." He told me to throw out the bait traps and of an apartment he went to that had a terrible ant infestation. He said the woman had about two dozen of these bait traps and that no one in the building had ants but her. She was calling to every ant in a four block radius!

Lol!

stormie said:

Thanks for the update, Perks! A vacuum cleaner. Okay. That'll work. Why vinegar works for me, I have no idea. Maybe my collection of ants was small. It even killed the crickets off.

Now, though, we have termites. Can't win 'em all.

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I washed the floor with vinegar and you were definitely right - they hated it. They ran away, but as soon as the salad-smell cleared out, they came back.

It was a lovely respite, an island in a sea of aaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!