I also use the liquid terro, good stuff. I place several drops in a bottle cap (keeps it from drying up too quickly) and like you say the ants slurp it up like they're at a watering hole. I like insects and strive to keep the "good" ones alive and well, but not ants. I see the insect world as being like little dinosaurs, plant eaters and meat eaters. I prefer the meat eaters since they eat the plant eaters and give my garden some protection from the plant eaters. Ants are one meat eater I won't like. What do ants want? >>> Your food sources and they'll stop at nothing to get into your cabinets, pantry, etc to get at it. They'll put some extra crunch in your Capt'n Crunch. ;-)

We use the terro but i comes in a plastic container the ants walk into and out of to get at the liquid.

Terro is great stuff. I like Vgkg's tip about using a bottle cap. We just buy a small plastic bottle of the stuff instead of the traps. We like to watch the action lol.

I had some last week, too. My bottle of Terro had spoiled (turned dark brown). The store i went to didn't have the bottles, but did have the Terro traps. I put one in the middle of the ant super highway, and there was no trace of them in 24 hours.

I have no remorse, but I'll admit that it is interesting to watch them .

Ants deserve your admiration, Claudia. They are arguably the most successful animal on Earth. I enjoy observing them whenever I can. I don’t want them in my home, however, and will also put the little Terro bait stations to work if I see any wandering around where they don’t belong.

I suggest reading E.O. Wilson’s The Ants, as well as any other of his books about ant behavior.

I caught a big black ant in my bathroom and threw him out the window rather than squash him. However However, Ive gone the Terro route, or mixed borax with pbj when i getan invasion of small,ants. One time there was a trail of them going in my back door, up the wall, across to a cabinet and into a container of honey. They sure are organized and determined.

I get them very year - there is a kitchen window that they can access by climbing up the siding and working their way through what must be a tiny gap or two in the corner behind the windowsill. I just put a bit of borax at that spot, which stops them.

One spring, when I opened the garage door after it hadn't been opened for a few months, I found a six inch high ant hill against the inside of the door, over a crack between the floor and the driveway blacktop. Generous sprinkles of borax worked there, too.

I grow several dwarf citrus in pots on my patio, along with seasonal flowers, and would often disturb a colony full of ant eggs when I moved a pot. Two winters ago I had a terrible aphid infestation, and discovered ants were actually going in and out of the corner of a second floor window to farm them! Now I make sure to have a sprinkle of borax under each pot while outdoors, and again when I bring them in for the winter, plus some on the windowsill where they were coming in before.

Sometimes I think our island is one gigantic ant nest, as they seem to be everywhere, and as soon as I eliminate one troop of them in the house, another shows up in a new spot.

I have the Terro bait stations as well. I haven't seen the bottles in stores for some time now.

And I did know about how some ants will carry their dead away. E.O. Wilson related a funny story on RadioLab about how he studied ant communication - which is through pheromones, since their hills are without light.

He said he observed that ants would carry their dead to middens, but only after a certain amount of time had elapsed, so he made an extract from such deceased ants and applied it to live ones, and what happened was other workers would carry them to the middens, place them there, and the live ants would leave of course, but then another worker would take them back to the midden again. He said it was rather comical to observe the treated ants waving their legs around as they were being transported 🙂

This product works well for me too, as it seems to kill ants that walk across the sprayed areas. I use it around my kitchen & bathroom windows and back door, since that's where most of them seem to get in.

I do find ants somewhat interesting. I seem to remember an ant farm kit as a child - which may have not been the most humane toy to give children by today's standards. But, not in my house. Thank goodness I have no experience with carpenter ants.

We did have an invasion of tiny little ants about three years ago. I have no idea why, they were in our bedroom and we don't eat at that end of the house although I will occasionally have a soft drink when at my bathroom vanity. I don't leave the glass there when the kitchen is all the way at the other end of this stretched out long house.

They first were discovered at that vanity. When I say tiny and little, I mean small enough they were coming in through a screened window. We are open window people but nothing is unscreened. Those little ants were giving me little fits ;) And they were relentless. DH put the Terro ant baits outside the window and propped one up against the baseboard inside. They were gone as quickly as they'd appeared.

Until a couple of weeks later when they began coming through a screened garden window on the other side of the room. I didn't notice them as quickly that day and spent about an hour on my knees with a flashlight aimed on the carpet and one index finger, squishing all I could find. It was many. And they were very close to our bed!

Same thing, Terro bait stations inside and out and problem was quickly solved. I still don't know why that end of the house or that room, but at now I'm alert and watch for them. They haven't returned.

I rarely see them outside, occasionally on the driveway. The only other time I've seen them group in mass they were crawling up the shepherds hook to a hummingbird feeder. DH rehung the feeders from cup hooks under the eaves and we haven't seen them converge on anything again. I don't miss them.

I have zero sympathy for ants, having been bitten by them three times in my pool this month. The bites are very painful and hurt for three days. They cannot survive in the pool, but they find their way onto my raft and bite me. They do make good food for lizards (unless they are fire ants) and perhaps for birds and spiders, but I still don't want them.

They were much worse where I grew up in Texas, and my sister got some very bad ant bites there while we were waiting for a school bus. We had both black and red ants, which were both fairly big, but I can't remember which ones had the worse bites. Red ants would have wars with black ants. They were a large part of the diet for horned toads, which I liked as a child. When I would find large ant beds near the house or where we waited for a school bus, I would pour gasoline in the ant bed, wait a few minutes, and then set it on fire. We had a gasoline pump in our back yard/driveway that our father used for his tractors.

Decades later, fire ants invaded Texas and displaced the native ants - they either ate them or just murdered them - but in a short time after the invasion, the native ants were gone, and the horned toads started to starve, as they would not eat fire ants - for good reason. The bites from fire ants are several times worse than regular ant bites, and they can kill livestock. After a few years, the fire ants were gone, and I do not know why. They may have run out of food.

My father decided that he liked the fire ants because they would take over an entire pasture or field and dig tunnels that aerated the earth, so that he did not have to plow the fields, and the fields produced much more grass. By this time, he had stopped growing crops and used pretty much all of his land as pastures for grazing cattle or other animals. I stayed away from the fields after the fire ant invasion, but then I had always stayed away from the fields, as I hated farm work and wanted to stay indoors growing up as much as possible. I also liked to stay out of the sun.

I put ants in the same category as mosquitoes - i.e., biting pests. Cockroaches are pests, but at least they do not attack and bite me.

I do like spiders and never kill those. Our lizards eat spiders as well as ants, but I imagine that the spiders are tastier. Ants are acrid and bitter.

Lars, I too have had a run in with Texas ants. They got me good. Not sure that they were fire ants, but they really did hurt and gave me a kind of "affected" feeling. This was down in Del Rio a good long time ago.

My mom, in east Texas, woudl find little baby rabbits that had been killed by the ants. Yes, those ants are to be avoided.

But, there are different kinds of ants and I dont think that the ones coming in to my house are of the same breed. I am in the mid Atlantic region.

It is unclear just what is that they are after. I followed one line that I thought were going into a pantry and heading for the open cereal boxes. But, that is not where they were going and I still dont know what their goal was. But, they are gone now.

It is alarming that the insects are disappearing. I have noticed a lack of spidesr in my house this year, too. We used to have a number of ones around, but not so much anymore. Also, the carpenter bees and the pill bugs have gone as have the large numbers of fireflies. I see very few fireflies anymore, and I have not see a June bug in years. When we first moved here, the June bugs would be all around the porch light. All gone.

I dont kill spiders, either. If they look scary I will catch them in a towel and let them outside. If they look like they are just minding their own business, I just let them go on about it.

Another bad insect is the mosquito. I have heard that since the Arctic climate is getting warmer that it has pit the mosquito season to be same time as the baby caribou are being born. The mosquitos, like the ants, can kill a baby caribou. Previously, the two events did not occur at the same time. But , it changed.

When my kids were little we would get 'sugar' ants. They tended to follow a line and head straight to the spilled Kool Aid or lollipop left on the counter. I haven't seen them in years but now I get odorous ants several times a year. They don't seem to follow a line - they just appear on the counter in the kitchen or on the floor in the bathroom. And for some reason they really annoy me. One day I probably killed 50 of them before DH came home with the Terro.

My exterminator sprayed all around the foundation of the house. When he pulled back some of the mulch he disturbed a nest and we watched them scurry to move the eggs. Now I keep a ready supply of Terro and ant spray.

https://extension.psu.edu/odorous-house-ant

Claudia, I also have noticed a decline in numbers of fireflies; this year also I have seen only one lone ladybug in my yard. My garlic was covered with aphids, which ladybugs would normally take care of in a trice - this year, not a single ladybug did I see attacking the aphids.

I wonder if it has to do with the increasing popularity in my neighborhood for having companies treat the yards for mosquitoes (which really are a plague here, for some reason). They use pyrethrin based sprays, which I think may be just as harmful to other beneficial insects as they are to our bees (I am also seeing fewer bees on my big stand of monarda than I have in the past.)

I believe the proliferation of bright outdoor lights is probably affecting the fireflies as well - both porch, back door (the folks behind me have a particularly bright one) and decorative.

This year I've been seeing ants for the first time (second summer in this house) - not a lot and I only see them singly, but there must be a lot. I was just thinking today that I have to buy some ant traps. I'll pick up some Terro brand this year.

I use a home made effective solution. I mix a 50/50 solution of borax and powdered sugar in a glass jar and then put small portions in bottle caps or jar lids. you will see ants in the powder for a week or two but resist the urge to kill them. let them take the borax solution back to the nest. Nothing has worked better for me.

Elizabeth, I have heard that you can do it that way, mix your own. I just bought the little bottle of Terro. It was handy and cheap.

Raee, I have also read some articles in the media about the fireflies. I had noticed the lack of them and then began to see that others have noticed it, too. Others have thought that maybe the bright suburban and urban lights are disturbing them. I know it disturbs me, too. Some have lights so bright it lights up like a prison yard. It is hard to find he nighttime anymore. I think it affects us, as well. I think that outdoor lights should have some restrictions on them, for many reasons.

I dont use any kind of "cide" in my yard, except for this Terro. I wonder does this still count as a poison? Of course it would be hard to imagine how it affects any but the ants who eat it.

I have a neighbor, on the other hand, who kills every living thing that crosses his yard, He either traps them, shoots them with an air rifle, or poisons them, or takes them out and drop them somewhere from the cage. He also defoliates and spreads chemicals everywhere. He is just an all around despicable person any which way you slice him, he comes up rotten and hateful.

The natural world is coming unraveled!!!

I too use Terro. I like the one that comes in a bottle and you pour a little out on a sqare of cardboard.

Sue

Claudia, the active ingredient in Terro, Borax, is not considered a toxic substance in most circumstances. Borax has numerous household and commercial uses, most of which are perfectly safe in close contact with consumers.

It’s only considered a pesticide when used to kill pests. Some ant species will ingest it, if mixed with a sweet ingredient. It then becomes a bait, which is a preferred delivery system as it is targeted to a specific group. I particularly like the little plastic trays because non target critters like cats can’t get to it. It might cause tummy distress.

Borax will kill other insects and non-insect arthropods, too. It works by ingestion as well as abrasion and dessication. For example, Roach Pruf, a well known roach killer, is borax. Homeowners typically use borax for silverfish, house centipedes, millipedes, spiders, and similiar household visitors. But your bait station is meant for ants only. Not much else can get to the active ingredient.

I’m so sorry that you have a nuisance neighbor. I know how infuriating that can be. I’ve had my fair share of neighbors who wanted to use all kinds of ’cides at every opportunity but still couldn’t achieve the sterility he yearned for, lol.

Another good thing about sodium tetraborate decahydrate, a.k.a. borax, is that insects do not develop any tolerance for it, AFAIK, unlike many other insecticides.

Claudia, I can relate to your feelings expressed in this thread. I presently have big black ants outside, venturing onto the porch sometimes, and little brown sugar ants in the kitchen. The latter disappear sometimes, and I think they're done, but then they come back. I may buy the Hot Shot spray Carol recommended, but the fact is I hate to kill them.

I don't feel that way about the big black ants at all, so I suppose that makes me a hypocrite. lol

Some people insist insects can't feel emotion. I disagree. If an ant is moving along my kitchen counter and I tap my finger near it, the ant takes off at top speed in the other direction. Fear is an emotion, and who knows what else they might feel? There's a lot we don't know.

Ants and other insects don't have a nervous system complex enough to support emotions/feelings. They are the definition of a hive-mind, IMO. I think they're pretty interesting, but they can stay out of our house, thanks. Plenty more everywhere, so I'm not endangering the species.

P.S. Carpenter ants tunnel in rotten wood. If you find them in your home, you need to check for that.

" If an ant is moving along my kitchen counter and I tap my finger near it, the ant takes off at top speed in the other direction. Fear is an emotion "

But we don't know that fear is the reason it runs in the other direction. The desire to survive is not necessarily because they fear death, it could be simply that they desire to survive to complete their job or fulfill their role to their community.

I thought I had posted this article but apparently I didn't. It contains information about ants and how to deal with them. Some of the hints were also mentioned in this thread.

https://www.thespruce.com/diy-ant-traps-7550733?hid=05967eb82308a969ad84528a5b90dfff3efd2511&did=9673338-20230727&utm_source=thespruce&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-spruce-daily_newsletter&utm_content=072723&lctg=05967eb82308a969ad84528a5b90dfff3efd2511

My nasty neighbor who kills everything has also threatned to eliminate us. Yes , he is a constant sickening threat to all of nature and civil society and I have my suspicions that he has more than a few times poisioned something over my side and burned toxic crap in his little fire thing. I know for a fact taht he defoliated my tree that borders his yard because one cluster of pink flowers was shedding in a one foot space in his yard. I know that the tree is often harboring birds nests. Just cutting off the cluster of flowers would have been much too civil for him. Nasty, nasty man!

Some people are the turd in their own punchbowl, like him.

He is all about his own feeling of domination over the world that he feels does not treat him right so he feels empowered over the small life that happens into his yard, and the old folks next door, us.

His yard seems always to be fragrant with something chemical and he has some special something that he sprays around in the evening if he hears that our door is opened and the TV is on. He is one sick, sick puppy! I am afraid that there are many others just like him out there, waiting for thier call up. He seems to almost vibrate with hate and anger. What a burden to carry all of that around in this one chance that we get at life. To spend it in hate, is so sad.

The insects have no defense against him and I also feel threatened.

I, personally, dont use any chemicals in the yard and very few otherwise, either.