Boiling or nearly so, water poured into an ant hill will take care of that one. But you wouldn't want to use that treatment if the anthill is among your favourite plants! Next best is grits, spread out on a tray and misted with room temperature sugar water, about the same proportion you would mix for the Hummers. Allow the grits to dry and then sprinkle them around the anthill. The ants eat the sugarcoated grits, it swells in their innards and they explode! Cruel, to be sure, but all of the fire ant treatments use grits as a basic ingredient, to do exactly the same thing. I have never had enough grubs and millipedes to consider them a nuisance, so haven't ever treated for them. Slugs and snails only feast on my Toad lilies (Tricyrtis), so I invest in a small bag of Sluggo every few years. I think it is probably one of the best Eco-friendly formulas on the market. One treatment per year is usually sufficient. I have a bird friendly, woodland habitat, so I don't use chemicals, if they can be avoided. The toxins could very well wind up as a portion of our feathered friend's meal! Rb

I bet your Ant is really ANTS, Digit! I don't know about carpenter ants, but I have tiny black ants in my yard that "don't exist" from mid-summer thru fall, but every spring they swarm out of "somewhere," and there are millions of them "piled up" on the grass or soil! I'll look out the window and see what looks like a little "pile" of potting soil that somehow was accidentally dumped on the grass, and when I go out to explore the situation I discover it's a writhing "clump" of ants! And they ARE tiny, so there really are MILLIONS of them. They have so undermined the soil under my sidewalk where it meets my little front porch that the sidewalk is now at least a couple inches lower than it originally was, and it's now a BIG step to get up onto the porch! From what I can figure out, it looks to me like they "thrived" for years under---wait for it---the landscape fabric and rock mulch the previous owners had put in! When I was removing all that "STUFF" I found huge nests of them, at least I found the hundreds of tunnels that went down into the, apparently, HUGE cities! They had even eaten huge holes in the (nasty!) landscape fabric! And that stuff is virtually indestructible! When I first found them I thought: No big problem! Funny me!!! At first I just took household insect spray and saturated the tunnels and soil around them. They stood there, stuck their tongues out at me, and laughed at me! After a couple years I discovered that dumping (gallons!) of ammonia down the tunnels helped--kinda! Except for the time I poured it around some HOT stepping stones when I killed the grass near the stones, it seemed to actually help the grass and plants, so I kept pouring--but there were ALWAYS more ants! A few years ago I started using Bug-B-Gon Max on the, also large, omnipresent population of earwigs I've had ever since moving in here. For a couple years they were eating more of my veggies than I was! Since that stuff was working for the earwigs I started sprinkling it in, on, and around the ants and tunnels whenever I found them, and that, finally, seems to be really helping! I'll know more for sure in about a month when they should start Erupting again! I'm not expecting them to be GONE this year, but I do expect them to be noticeably "diminished!" Hoping in a couple years I'll be able to mostly rid my yard of them! If I were you I'd do some Serious Watching this spring, so if they really are there--in a huge city somewhere far down in the underworld--you'll find them as soon as possible and be able to start to "do something" about them. The longer they're there, the worse they'll be. I have NO doubt about that! Good luck, Skybird P.S. HI, BugDoc! Welcome to RMG! Nice to see somebody around here who might know something about "bugs!" If you have time, go to the Who's Here in 2014 thread and introduce yourself. We're glad you found us!

Welcome, Betty in Georgia!!! I think I've seen you somewhere before *g*. I am so happy to have been a part of your conversion, and you are going to love it here (especially the OT threads, those are my favorites...we like to get friendly). OK, look up at the top of this page, there is a green bar that says Blogs, Forums, Photo Galleries, etc. Hover your mouse over "Forums" and you will see "Garden Forums" as one of the choices. Click on that and it will take you to a listing of all (and there are a LOT!) of the garden forums. Scroll down a ways on the page and, on the left side, you'll see "Georgia Gardener". Or, follow this link: Here is a link that might be useful: Georgia Gardener

Hi Ya Ya, If your pants had gotten too hot ... you'd have been yellin', "Ya - ya", for sure ... at high enough decibel levels to have brought Twinkie a runnin'!! They say that there are rules governing the kind of materials that can be put into (mattresses?) - not rapidly flammable. But the same can't be said for the materials that go into upholstering and fabric of furniture, carpets, clothing, etc. That many of them catch fire much more rapidly, burn faster and hotter, and throw off more noxious fumes, than do natural materials. That, due to that, if we get a fire in the home ... when the smoke alarm goes off ... we have about 3 min. to get out of there. Or be done in by much more rapidly developing/moving fire ... or nasty fumes (e.g. cyanide). Just a word to the wise. ole joyful