Death to Ants!
If you're like me, you hate ant infestations, but don't want to kill your beebs along with them. Since it's that time of the year (we've been spotting a few big black ants and one beetle per day in our bathroom this past week), I thought I'd post the following "recipe" for getting rid of ants. The entire article (source: Birds N Ways / Winged Wisdom) is lengthy, so here's the most relevant part paraphrased by me.
Recipe and usage
* 1 teaspoon boric acid powder (I found borax in the pest control section of my hardware store - get the smallest container they have)
* 6 tablespoons sugar
* 2 cups hot water
* Container to mix/store it in
* small plastic containers like for condiments from fast food/take out, or else small disposeable cups.
* cotton balls or rolled cotton wrap
Cut a few slits/holes around the bottom edge of the small containers, big enough for the ants to fit through. Put some cotton in the small containers. In the storage container, mix the boric acid, sugar, and hot water (hot makes it dissolve better). You may wish to use gloves and tongs when handling the boric acid to be extra safe, though it should be at a sufficiently low dilution to be safe enough without. Mix well. Pour a small amount of the resultant liquid onto the cotton in each small container - you shouldn't have any liquid at the bottom, it should all be absorbed into the cotton.
Place the traps around where you see the ants, and preferably out of reach of any pets. This stuff is *supposed* to be non-toxic to our birds, but it never hurts to play it safe. Wash your hands thoroughly after any handling, just in case.
The way it works is the ants come in and b/c of the sugar they take some of the mix back to their nest, where it kills the queen since the boric acid is toxic to them. Watch what you see for a few days. If you keep seeing more live ants, up the concentration of the boric acid in the master mix a little. If you see dead ants, you have too much boric acid (you're killing them before they can bring the stuff back to their queen) so add more water and sugar to the mix. If the cotton dries out, add more of the mix. If all works well, within three days you won't see any more ants return - last summer I used this on tiny little brown sugar ants, there were easily hundreds of them around and even in the birdcage, and they were gone within just a couple days and never came back.
Ick. Bugs give me the heebie-jeebies when they're in "my" space. This'll get rid of them though.
Recipe and usage
* 1 teaspoon boric acid powder (I found borax in the pest control section of my hardware store - get the smallest container they have)
* 6 tablespoons sugar
* 2 cups hot water
* Container to mix/store it in
* small plastic containers like for condiments from fast food/take out, or else small disposeable cups.
* cotton balls or rolled cotton wrap
Cut a few slits/holes around the bottom edge of the small containers, big enough for the ants to fit through. Put some cotton in the small containers. In the storage container, mix the boric acid, sugar, and hot water (hot makes it dissolve better). You may wish to use gloves and tongs when handling the boric acid to be extra safe, though it should be at a sufficiently low dilution to be safe enough without. Mix well. Pour a small amount of the resultant liquid onto the cotton in each small container - you shouldn't have any liquid at the bottom, it should all be absorbed into the cotton.
Place the traps around where you see the ants, and preferably out of reach of any pets. This stuff is *supposed* to be non-toxic to our birds, but it never hurts to play it safe. Wash your hands thoroughly after any handling, just in case.
The way it works is the ants come in and b/c of the sugar they take some of the mix back to their nest, where it kills the queen since the boric acid is toxic to them. Watch what you see for a few days. If you keep seeing more live ants, up the concentration of the boric acid in the master mix a little. If you see dead ants, you have too much boric acid (you're killing them before they can bring the stuff back to their queen) so add more water and sugar to the mix. If the cotton dries out, add more of the mix. If all works well, within three days you won't see any more ants return - last summer I used this on tiny little brown sugar ants, there were easily hundreds of them around and even in the birdcage, and they were gone within just a couple days and never came back.
Ick. Bugs give me the heebie-jeebies when they're in "my" space. This'll get rid of them though.