Most homeowners have had to deal with ants at some point. They’re one of the most common household pests in the United States. Ants are attracted to food and moisture, so your kitchen and bathroom are likely targets.
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There are a few things you can do to get rid of ants and keep them from coming back. Start by cleaning up any food or water that’s available to them. Keep your counters clean and your food in sealed containers. If you have a leaky faucet or pipe, fix it as soon as possible.
You can also try some do-it-yourself ant control methods, like setting out bait stations or using a homemade ant spray.
Get Rid of Ants in the House: Home Remedies
There are a number of home remedies that can be used to get rid of ants. Some remedies only drive the pests away while others attempt on their lives. If the infestation is not that extreme, you can keep a lighter hand and use remedies that don’t kill the ants. But if there are ants all over, scavenging, biting, and infecting food, you may want to deal with a rather harder hand.
These home remedies only drive or scare the insects away and don’t actually kill them. The effectiveness of these methods varies depending on various factors.
1. Vinegar and Vinegar Essence
Vinegar can also be used as a cleaning agent, it has a strong smell, and vinegar essence is even more intense. Spraying directly onto the ant trail in multiple locations or pouring directly into the burrow will mask the pheromone trail significantly and ants will become disoriented.
A ring of vinegar sprayed around some ants locks the animals in like an invisible wall. Depending on the weather, the effect lasts for days, and an ant colony affected by the vinegar is even abandoned quite quickly. Then you have to keep at it so that the insects don’t make a fresh comeback.
2. Chilis And Cinnamon
Cinnamon and chili powder also interrupt the ant trails but do not encourage ants to leave their burrow. Cinnamon oil, which smells much more intensively, is more effective.
3. Lemons Peels to Drive Ants Away
The peels contain substances that stink to the ants and make them turn back into the burrow. Just grate some shells on an ant trail and the insects will turn back. Lemons are particularly suitable for patios and balconies because they smell pleasant to us humans too. Who would want to sit in a vinegar cloud?
4. Herbs and Aromatic Plants
lavender, thyme, or marjoram have a strong odor of their own. Branches laid out act as a natural barrier and keep the ants at a distance. The animals usually do not build nests near such plants.
5. Plant Manure Against Ants
With homemade manure made from wormwood or stinging nettle-oregano manure, you not only interrupt the ant traffic, but the effective home remedies ideally also chase the ants out of their nests and force them to move.
Start fighting with manure in early spring and pour the broth into the entrances to the nests from the previous year. Because ants spend the winter deep underground and often move back into the old dwellings. In order to thoroughly spoil the old apartment for the animals, pour the liquid manure into the building. This also works in summer with nests that have already been populated or just been created.
For the liquid manure, let 300 grams of fresh or 30 to 40 grams of dry herb ferment in ten liters of water for about 14 days.
6. Copper to Scare Away The Ants
Ants hate the smell of copper. Putting a few strips of a copper sheet in the nests and arranging a few more around them can certainly scare away the ants. As with all home remedies, it is definitely worth a try.
Home Remedies to Getting Rid of Ants (Kill Bill)
Some methods do not scare off the pests but destroy them completely. Since the home remedies are of course not as effective as biocides, the animals often die in agony. Therefore, one should rather avoid the following means.
1. Pour Boiling Water into The Nest
hit crawlers and their brood and larvae are scalded immediately, the water penetrates relatively deep into the nests if you use it by the liter. However, if the water is no longer boiling hot, it only gives the ants a painful heat shock.
2. Baking Powder (Brutal, not recommended)
Often touted as a miracle cure as a home remedy, the effect is a double-edged sword. The insects burst after ingesting the powder, as plenty of carbon dioxide is released. Not particularly pleasant!!
On the other hand, as an alkaline substance, baking powder actually repels ants – they avoid it. Just mixed with powdered sugar, it is eaten. Then, however, there are also useful insects such as bees or butterflies that keep on the sweet powder – with the same flatulence. This limits the use of this barbaric home remedy indoors. In any case, only the workers are affected, the queens are not fed with the drug because it works far too quickly. The ants burst before they reach the burrow.
3. Coffee Powder
Coffee powder repels ants with its scent, but the caffeine also kills ants that are constantly in contact with the coffee powder or should eat it.
4. Beer or Sugar Water
Sugar water or beer mixed with sugar next to nests or ant trails are said to attract insects. They fall into the liquid and drown. This may even work, but it also traps beneficial insects that are not intended at all.
So, these were all the home remedies to getting rid of ants yourself. If you think the infestation is so severe that you will have a hard time dealing with the crawlers, you may need to ask for professional help.