Boom says:

Little Jonestowns for Ants 0

Anonymous says:

*please read my updates belowJUNE 20, 2013:About a month ago I noticed a couple of ants here and there in my bathroom, undoubtedly attracted to the moisture. I’d smash them and get on with my day. There were too few for me to care–maybe 2 or 3 a day. But it was everyday, so I got some Boric Acid powder and sprinkled it along the baseboards. When ants crawl over the boric acid, it sticks to their legs, and then when they clean their mouths with their legs, they accidentally ingest some of the boric acid and it kills them. Well, that’s great, except it only kills the ants that make contact with it. And I’d still see a couple of ants everyday. I didn’t want to spray with Raid because my bathroom is right next to my bedroom.Well, the other day I was carrying a bath towel to my laundry room. I noticed that an ant was on the towel(I assume to try to drink whatever moisture was on the towel), and I shook it off while I was in the kitchen, which is on the way to the laundry room. The ant fell to the ground, but because ants are tiny and it was a little dark, I couldn’t find it. I thought to myself “oh who cares? It’s just one ant. It’ll probably just crawl back to the bathroom.” Well the next morning I saw hundreds of ants in my kitchen, right next to where that one damn ant fell. They were coming from the baseboard behind my refrigerator and made a pathway into my garbage can. I was rushing to get to work, so all I could do was Raid the line of ants and throw out the trash. I knew that I had a serious ant problem either under the house or in the walls that I couldn’t see, and I was getting really sick of it. If they want to pay for half my mortgage, i’d let them stay. But this is MY house! I had never tried an ant bait before. Growing up my dad would always use spray pesticides whenever we had ants, so that’s what I am used to. But because of the vicinity of my bedroom to the bathroom, I had to do something different.Before I got home from work, I bought these Terro Ant Baits at Home Depot. The way that this bait works is that the ants drink the bait, and via trophallaxis(regurgitation to feed other ants), the poison spreads out in the colony. I didn’t want to attract more ants into the kitchen, so at about 7pm on June 20th, I placed one bait in the bathroom, against a wall about 4 feet away from where I saw an ant. Within a minute, that ant walked into the trap. It left for a while and within 5 minutes there were 20 ants all around the bait. Within one hour, I saw hundreds of ants making a line from near the door to the bait. One of the advantages of a bait is that you can see where the ants are coming from. Just follow the line. These little fother muckers were coming from a tiny hole where the door meets the floor, so they must have been under the house in the crawl space. Once the ants are eradicated, I can simply caulk up that little hole. All night there were hundreds or thousands of ants. Afraid I would run out of fluid in the bait, I added another bait in their path. Quickly, both bait traps were being visited by the ants.I went to bed at midnight, and there were still the same amount of ants. Hard to fall asleep when you know there are hundreds of ants just 12 feet away from you. But the ants didn’t stray from their path, so I felt ok.This morning at 7am, I noticed about a 25% reduction in the # of ants. I went to work. I got home at 8pm. I see only about 10 ants now. All alive, except for the dead ones in the traps, but they are moving slowly and I can’t imagine they’ll live much longer. I see zero ants coming out of that hole. So it’s been a wild ride! I went from 3 ants at 7pm prior to the trap, then hundreds by midnight while the traps were out, and now we’re down to about 10 dying ants. I imagine that by the time I go to bed tonight, they’ll all be gone. This product is working faster than I thought it would. The Terro website says that it takes the individual ant 24-48 hours from ingestion to death. They must have spread the poisonous meal around pretty quickly in their colony!Tips: 1. One bait trap should be plenty. I checked one of the traps when I got home and it was still almost full of poisonous fluid. Remember, there were hundreds of ants drinking from this bait. So i’d say just use one for the first 24 hours. If you have more ants by the second day, then go ahead and put out another trap. 2. Once ants have found your bait and are drinking from it, don’t move it. It seems to make them not want to come back to it.I will leave the traps out another couple of days just in case. If I don’t come back to edit this review, you can assume it worked perfectly, and fast!UPDATE JUNE 24th: I have left the traps out since the 20th, and each day i still see a couple of ants in the bathroom, hovering around the bait trap, but they won’t go inside. I’m not sure why. Today, about 4 days after my initial review,…