karenchi

Just was on Good Morning America on Fri.
Go to website and click on Fri episodes.
Lot of good advice

texas granny

I live in the piney woods in Texas and I have fought the carpenter ants for over 25+ years you treat and treat they just move and then come back. We have a sandy soil and with the amount of rain the ants are worse then before. I have done them all the corrnmeal , the bug spray. The ants will strip a tree of leaves over night.
They take the leaves back to the nest and it makes fungus and they eat on it along with the wood and other thing they get.
You can follow the ants back to the nest and then walk a little more and find another hole. All the different treatment work on the ants jusy can't get to the QUEEN

lab fairy

Too true. Unfortunately most ants are just like this. I sincerely hope that there will at some point be a better method for dealing with these little buggers. I'm guessing you're treating the ground, wood, everything you can find? We feel like it is the neverending story as far as fire ants are concerned. This is one time when no one will yell "long live the queen!"

Connie Merritt

I also found BIG black ants in the kitchen. Started to just kill them manually then they seemed to multiply. Nothing worked (at least what I tried) so I called an exterminator. That was the good ending; they guaranteed their work so when the ants came back (and they did) back came the extreminator. Well they finally found the damp area, sprayed and for the last three years, no ants. So maybe you should try the boric acid cure and if that doesn't work then you have the other choice.

Either way, I wish you luck. Those are Ucky things.

Tinabodina

Yellow cornmeal works great also. They can not digest it and it kills them back in their nest. (Old family thing.)

catrancher

These are the same ants we got in our RV on a recent camping trip. My husband did quite a bit of reading on how to get rid of them. He learned that it is a myth that they eat wood. Actually, they tunnel into the wood and store aphids, which they care for and feed to keep them well. The aphids give off some kind of sweet substance that the ants like, and the aphids have a good deal with the ants feeding them and taking care of them. Isn't that positively ghoulish?

Sorry I'm not sure what he came up with as a remedy. It had something to do with dipping cotton balls in a solution of boric acid. Apparently, they take the bits of cotton from the cotton balls back to the nest so that it kills all the ants in the nest, not just the one ant at the poison well.

fmd36

Bothered year after year in our single, old mobile by the tiny sugar ants. Generally I start with the commercial ant traps, them move up to boric acid and---believe it or not -- cucumber peelings seem to kill them. I mix the boric acid with either vinegar or water. Just have to keep it up. Be careful not to leave any food on the counter and clean out the toaster tray. Use vinegar mix to wipe down counter tops. Hope this helps.

Alice Woodhull

Ihave them coming into my kitchen through the dish washer. When I open the door, there are oodles of them in there. I put Terro out and once they get to it, they disappear for afew weeks and them come back. So I put it out again.

lab fairy

Different types of ants like different baits. Carpenter ants, fire ants, sugar ants are all different. They are ants but eat different things. What effectively controls one won't really control another. We finally caught a couple on sticky clear tape and talked to pest control experts. It never hurts to clean out all traps in your diswasher (food gets trapped in there) and you might have wood rot under the cabinet or behind it. Either one will attract ants. Depending on what you find will determine how to treat. If its rot, you're better off knowing sooner than later. If you have food trapped in the filter of your dishwasher (not all have garbage disposals built in) then cleaning it out will help remove the ant buffet.

Nanjun

I had them too, all over my kitchen one morning. called my pest man and he came out and sprayed everywhere then told me to spray my counters, drawers, and pantry with VINEGAR. They left and I keep a spray bottle handy.