Ants !

[Jethro_uk]

In the last day I have seen ants in 5 different places in the house !

[Adrian Caspersz]

Same, we spray vinegar and dust ant powder around. Not easy to see where they are nesting unless we pull up floorboards.

The theory that they can collect poisoned 'food' and take it back to kill the queen, is a long shot. I have also bait traps.

One night one crept onto my pillow and into my ear. That was fun :-(

I think a small nuclear device might work, or give them two heads.

[Brian Gaff]

Yes well, they look for food, so you need to be a bit circumspect on working out where they are going. Normally, if they find something, they lay down a kind of scent trail and then you get that column you often see. Some types of ant do of course use greenfly, but others are scavengers. Brian

[Paul]

If the ants are moving in random directions, and not moving with their normal speed, it means the queen has died. Ants are task based, they receive orders, and execute. When the queen is gone, there is no longer a chain of command. Order falls apart.

Some of the ants in such cases, will walk out in the middle of a floor and just stand there. As if to say "go ahead, stomp on me and put me out of my misery".

When the queen dies, you can continue to see random workers for up to six weeks. The workers are less likely to follow "main trails", because they have not been given marching orders ("forage", "scout").

Ants have various mechanisms, that this does not happen all that often (queen dies, no successor). Normally, this sort of pattern happens if you've been actively working on poisoning them.

If an ant won't take your sugar/borax solution, continue to watch the ants. Some larger ants, will raid small ant nests and carry off ants still alive (they don't kill them). If you deliver your sugar/borax to the smaller ants, those ants are more likely to eat sugar/borax. If a small ant that has consumed sugar/borax is hauled back to the big ant nest, you may eventually be able to kill the queen that way. But, this is not a fast process.

You may have noticed, that home-made sugar/borax does not work as well as commercial preparations. I suspect the commercial preparations have something added which is more "attractive". Honeydew would work for that, but I don't know how hard it is to prepare honeydew in commercial quantities. Locally, the source might be aphids (plant-sucking insects).

Paul

[Animal]

IME ants love thin syrup, eg from canned fruit, so maybe a bit of borax in some.

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

Same problem here, every years, they come in from the garden. What always works here is...

A mix of 50/50 borax, icing sugar, placed in a plastic bottle cap. I add a drop of liquid honey, as an extra tempter.

[Tim Lamb]

Ping our Chemists. The chemistry of the various *Borax* products offered on Amazon etc. seems to vary. Is this likely to be significant in terms of *Ant killing* performance?

[Rod Speed]

Nope, it means they are scouting for new food.

It is in fact MUCH more complicated than that.

They don't actually recieve orders, they specialise in role.

There never are orders.

[Rod Speed]

Yep, particularly with how attractive it is to ants.

[Animal]

Borax is just borax. I fully expect say you could buy 1/10th the amount of something with 10% borax for 10x the price.

[Paul]

OK, watch a hundred workers, carry baby ants (wrapped in white material) to a satellite nest (a nursery, no queen is present). Are you telling me the queen spins up a hundred workers designed purely for a satellite nest mission ? I don't think so.

They don't carry babies one at a time. There isn't one worker doing the transfer. It's arranged as a "mission", with a large number of workers. And it's done two hours before dawn, so that the babies don't dry out in transit.

And the location, has to be marked by a scouting party before hand. it can take multiple scouting parties, over a number of days, to find a nest site.

When you take a crowbar and a blow torch, to a nest in some wood, which ants carry babies away from the fracas ? They all do. Any available ant will carry a baby away. It's not clear, whether carrying a baby away serves any purpose, as it would be too hard to successfully build another nest in time to make use of the babies.

When the queen is dead, the other ants no longer have a reason to do anything. You would not, for example, see ants continuing to forage and bring the materials back to a "dead nest". The ants are not quite that mechanical. If the ants continued to carry out fixed activities, they would stay on "main trails", and when the queen is dead, they don't do that.

Paul

[Paul]

The material is generally set at around 6%.

I have no idea how that value was selected.

When you put down sugar/borax, apply in smaller droplets.

The problem with workers, is they will stick their snout into a large droplet, and they will try and consume the whole thing. The borax overcomes them before the job is done, and you can find an ant "drowned" in the oversized droplet.

If a smaller droplet is available, a worker consumes it, then walks back to the nest with it. Hopefully, to transfer the material to a nest mate, before they are overcome by the borax.

Small mammals will consume the sugar solution too. If you find the small droplets applied, are "disappearing too consistently" and every last bit is gone (and it did not dry up), chances are a small mammal has eaten it on you. If the ants are working on it, major bits of it will still be there.

At the nest, when a worker brings back food, it is sorted at the entrance. Much of what workers bring back is discarded. If a work brings back a chair or a sofa, the staff at the entrance immediately take the items and throw them into a "tip area". And this is one of the problems with poison, is you may see a worker suck it up, but then... nothing happens.

it depends on the time of year, what the queen prefers.

In the early winter, if an ant nest "wakes up" before spring, they can go around your house looking for sugar. This is the most vulnerable time for them. Now, your sugar/borax is virtually guaranteed to work, as they now have absolutely no other food options.

But if it is warm outside, the workers will bring back random things, and some of the materials won't be judged suitable. And you can't know, what they're doing, except to notice the queen isn't dead yet.

That's why I like the trick, of feeding borax to the small ants, that the larger ants pirate. If they carry enough of the sick smaller ants back to the nest, they will be judged to be "protein" and perhaps, get consumed by somebody who matters. And you are reduced to trying this, if nothing else is working for you.

In Canada, they have taken away our sugar/borax 6% bottles from us. You have to mix your own, or if you're lucky, buy some from the USA. We also cannot have 2-4D for the lawn, and the glyphosate is under "lock and key". If you have ants here now, "you're f***ed" is the only expression I can use. Exterminators are as useless as t*ts on a bull. (Somebody here, does know how to treat them, but we cannot be sure how dangerous the treatment is.) If an exterminator applies diatomaceous earth to such a problem, they are "pulling your chain and wasting your time".

If I knew what "the good stuff" was, I'd tell you. You might not even find the details in Google. The industry does not want these details to spread.

There is this. Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). They have to make custom strains, to treat different insects.

There is a patent for one, for Fire Ants. But this is not a persistent material, so even if it was adjusted for a local ant species, it might not be of that much use to you.

You would prefer a persistent, so you would not have to be chasing after them all the time.

Paul

[Jeff Layman]

Other spinosad-containing products are available.

[Rod Speed]

Nope, they are reacting to the presence of the baby ants.

But there is no mechanism to deliver specific orders for the task.

Because they are reacting to the threat. They have not received specific orders from the queen to do that.

They don't just all collectively curl up and die.

[Animal]

Another method is to put down a tin with some fruit syrup left in it. It's food & they'll gorge on it, but many will fall in & die, and they then move away to somewhere less lethal.