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Ants: Problem and Solution

June 13th, 2018 at 01:47 pm

Monday I worked late at the office and got home around 9 pm to find a swarm of about 20 or 25 carpenter ants on my kitchen counter. I had left a small amount of leftover sugar water in a cup on the counter after refreshing the hummingbird feeder.

I took a deep breath and squelched the impulse to kill them all, ASAP, and instead I set out some Terro liquid ant baits. I'd forgotten I had these and so they were well over a year old. They had leaked out of the unopened containers but I put them out anyway, on little index cards to catch any spill-over. The ants quickly took to them.

The next morning, there were still ants feeding on the Terro, but not as many as before. When I came home from work that night (yesterday), there were just 2 ants.

But even more amazing is this: About a week earlier, I was actually hearing crinkly sounds coming from either underneath my upstairs bath window or from under the roof shingles where the roof of garage/sunroom meets the bathroom wall. I had a feeling it was ants because I'd noticed dead insect parts dropping through the ceiling of the sunroom below that area several years earlier, but had sealed up a crack in that area with caulk and foolishly, perhaps, never really did anything else.

But with that crinkly noise, it seemed an ant nest was thriving inside the wall, and I reluctantly decided it was time to call an exterminator, who would probably want to drill holes through the wallpaper in my bathroom to dust them.

But after I put out the Terro ant baits in the KITCHEN, there was no crinkly sounds coming from upstairs bathroom wall!

Apparently, the ants were traveling from the side of the house by the bathroom to the back center of the house on the back wall to kitchen. In fact, when I had the swarm of ants going after the sugar water, there were enough ants coming and going that I could finally see where they were coming in: they drilled 2 tiny holes in a corner of trim by the ceiling above the kitchen door.

No wonder when I looked around at night with a flashlight I could find no ant trails leading to the house...they were already nesting elsewhere inside the house.

10 stars on Amazon for sure!

3 Responses to “Ants: Problem and Solution”

  1. ceejay74 Says:
    1528900227

    Terro is AMAZING. Yeah it's a bit gross that you have to leave the ants alone as they feast, but it's so effective!

  2. crazyliblady Says:
    1529075682

    Wow. That is cool. We used something kind of like that several years ago when we had a roach infestation after my stepdaughter moved out. We tried all of the usual stuff first to starve them out, but that did not work well enough. We finally used some of those little round discs for roaches followed by cleaning the whole house top to bottom. Worked first time.

  3. rob62521 Says:
    1529091676

    So glad the Terro worked. Glad you remembered you had it and put it out in a timely manner!

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