Having problems with big black ants in our house and how can I get rid of them? any ideas


I was reading this article

http://www.thefrugallife.com/ants.html

I think the big black aunts are carpenter aunts??? Make sure you spray around the outside foundation & doorsteps, & garage entrance of your house. I see lots of aunts outside, but none inside yet.

I killed one the other day, but it was not easy, it would not DIE!

Funny you should say that. I was at a outdoor party yesterday & had to step on one 3 times - on cement patio - before it would die.

what is the best spray to use as we have a dog inside house

I don't spray anything "inside" the house. You can buy the spray at HomeDepot, Lowes, etc. & just spray around foundation & door sills "outside".

We've been battling with the small sugar ants all summer. I put the little ant baits in the corner of my kitchen counters. Seems to have slowed them down a bit.

Big black ants are most likely carpenter ants. You need to locate the nest usually under a board, somewhere they can hide. Check at Lowes, Home Depot or hardware store to find insectide strong enough to kill the nest.

I found this on the web....I have used it successfully!


Natures Insecticide:
Boric Acid is the "secret ingredient" in so many commercial treatments for insect control. Boric acid (100%) powder is odorless and nonstaining. Kills roaches,termites, fireants, palmetto bugs,ticks,bedbugs, fleas, boxelder bugs, carpet beetles, centipedes, crickets, earwigs, grasshoppers,millipedes, scorpions, slugs water bugs,and many many more creepy crawly insects.

Ants : This past year have been on a rampage here in Fl, the insect capitol of the world. This homemade treatment has worked very well on both carpenter ants and pharaoh ants.
Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon of Boric Acid, 1 tsp of Sugar, 4 oz water, Cotton Balls.
Mix Boric Acid and Sugar in a bowl. This can be poured over a cotton wad in a small dish or bottle cap. Keep this from drying out for continued effectiveness. Place Cotton balls in path of Ants.

OMG............yes I went into the kitchen at night I didn't know they were nocturnal and the counter and wall were covered with them. I never had big black ants before. I was like a crazy person killing them. I realized they were coming in from the deck door. I wiped everything down with peppermint oil and set up little cup with borax and sugar/honey. I also sprayed outside by the door. Within a day they were gone. However 2 weeks later they decided to send there cousins to visit. The same thing happened walk in the kitchen at night they were all over the counter and wall. They were the smallest ants I have even seen. I did the same this with the peppermint oil. So far so good.

We got those big black ants this year too. Definately worth hiring an exterminator. My kid sister got them one year & ignored it, within two years they got really nasty. They're not AS distructive as termites, but over time they can cause some serious damage.

You can buy a spray called Bug Stop by Spectrecide It works great last for 9 months in side and out.
This worked when nothing else would.

I agree with Roseanne. Call an exterminator, they don't charge all that much and they'll find them and wipe them out. Then after you get rid of them you can do your own maintenance spraying.

Left untreated or partially treated, carpenter ants can be super-destructive, they're almost as bad as termites. BTDT.

Carpenter ants will be coming to look for moisture. You can help keep them out by making sure there are no leaks or moist spots in the house. Watch the outside of the house to see where they are coming and going from, then a spray on just that spot will kill them as they walk through it. Keep following them away from the house to find their nest and destroy it.

Carpenter ants are tough. They get into your foundation, fences, trees, etc. Getting rid of a whole colony is difficult. Baiting is usually best (we tried it all). Home remedies are placebos. The best solution we found for inside with the animals was to bait along the trail with Advance Carpenter Ant Bait (Whitmore Micro-Gen). I have a direct 800 number if you need it. It is TOXIC which is why it WORKS. Boric acid just doesn't seem to get the job done on big colonies of carpenter ants and fire ants. We had to make sure to put it where the cats would not get to it. But to be honest, my cats won't eat anything that is not in their special bowel (Each has their own. They don't eat out of each other's bowel either which makes it easy to see who's the pig of the duo. :thumbup: )

When I see an unusual amount of ants, I think of bad weather coming that year..the ants know

put out cornmeal where they are coming in at . The ants take it back to the nest and they die

Not big black ants, but outside , wherever I pull out weeds, around mulch, under rocks, tiny tiny black ants by the thousands!! I've never seen so many ants as we've had this year. Thank God they are outside!!

Yes, they are carpenters ants. Our exterminator sprayed and followed the ants route and found the mother lode in a tree hole. There were soooo many ants, it was a little creepy. But that is nothing compared to the scorpions and snakes we have seen.

Kids like using a black light to find scorpions. They fluoresce under UV light (love that glow). We've finally gotten a handle on the huge fire ant colony on our street. It took everyone treating for them at the same time or they just moved the entrance to the main colony to an untreated yard. What a pain. Ants, termites and those 2 inch cockroaches seem to rule down here. Not real fond of any of them.

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

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

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!"

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last year I had a lot of ants come in the house, but
with boric acid I killed them, except for some that kept
on eating the cat food. So on the advice of a friend, I
put down some mint breath fresheners, and the ants
left and didn't return. Since that was so successful, I
tried it outdoors and the ants LOVED them and swarmed
all over them. Had to revert to boric acid and sugar again
there. Possibly a different kind of ant outdoors.
As for the cats, they thought the mints were play things
and I had a hard time keeping track of the mints.

When we bought our house, the inspector said we needed to have our house and yard professionally sprayed as these ants work similar to termites on the wood. We used Ortho Defense all over (without a professional) and it worked wonderfully. We bought our house in 2004 and havent seen any more since.
I hope this helps! :)

An equal amount of granulated sugar and powdered borax hand soap. Place about a teaspoon on small cut up squaes of paper towels and leave on the floor etc in diffrent (many) places around the house. ALso spread the combination all around the outside of the house close to the foundation. They will eat and be gone. It really does work. I did it for two years in a row and have only seen 3-4 so far this year in the house.

We moved into our hundred-year-old (somewhat neglected) house about 8 years ago. The first two years, during the hot humid days of summer, here came the black ants. They were huge! Curious that they were in no other room of the house than the second-floor bathroom and seemed to be coming from a storage area we hadn't yet got to for remodel, etc.

Because we had dogs, we wanted to poisons, etc., so did the cornmeal thing. Within a couple days, we saw no more. Next year, there they were again, but not quite as many as the year before. Repeated the process. Had nothing for the next several years after that. Then, I saw one or two this year and went right at it. NO MORE ANTS!

Hope this clean, safe way works for you.

I don't know if baking soda would work. A friend of mine moved into a new apartment with roaches (yuck!), and quickly got them under control with lines of baking soda around all walls, counters, etc., and her youngsters were safe as well. Might be worth a try for the ants if the cornmeal doesn't turn them off. I think they won't crawl through the baking soda.

We must have super ants down here. They walk through baking soda, borax, boric acid, vinegar (I've used up to a 30% solution, very stinky)... Cornmeal might work if they actually eat the stuff but not all ants do. Some actually eat molds that live in soil and wood, leaves, ... And sugar ants really don't seem to be after our sugar at all. Go figure. I really hate when the fire ants get into the electrical wiring, chew the insulation and cause a short. Finding their new mischief is always fun. It never fails to be behind the hardest to remove electrical conduit in the house. Last time it was the central A/C compressor wiring. Fortunately, a neighbor works on them and bailed me out.

This stuff is great! It did the job for us too, when nothing else would. Safe for inside and out.

Don't use boric acid around pets.

sprinkle borax around outside , I dont like cheimical sprays

After the proof reading post I want to know....do you let the uncles in the house? LOL

We've got tons of the little black sugar ants. I don't know why in the world they're coming in the house, unless it's to escape the heat. I keep the kitchen counters spotless, and no dishes in the sink, but they're still crawling everywhere. We can't use sprays inside the house (we have birds), but Hubby has sprayed around the outside several times. Nothing seems to work long-term, not even boric acid. :(

It probably doesn't help matters that we live literally 10' from the woods. I guess they're strolling out of the woods and right into the house.

Too bad they're too small to be on our cats' "radars". They'll catch larger bugs in a heartbeat, but they just don't seem to notice the ants! :lol: