As if bedbugs were not enough to plague us, now it is ants.

Now we have lived in all sorts of places, and we have had ants regularly in some of those places. Every spring, ants would invade the kitchen. It is always the kitchen, sometimes the bath if your bathroom is not clean.

They are always the same… No matter the kind.

We have had 4 kinds of ants in the house, and one additional kind in the yard.

1. Small black ants. They show up with just a few, then more and more, they do not swarm, there are no wings.

2. Grease ants. Very small black ants. The same as the Small black ants, they show up a few at a time, more and more, and they don’t swarm, they just increase. They hang around your stove and kitchen counters.

3. Winged ants, not all winged, but a few, the rest just SWARMING. They will go for a certain place in the home, and form a massed trail of ants. They are black ants, not large. Often go for a window sill or some other structure. When you spray for these (and you have to), you spray RIGHT DOWN where they are coming in, and then go outside and see if you can find any there, and spray those too. These tend to happen SUDDENLY, and EPISODICALLY, and can happen just ONCE OR TWICE a year. Creepy. But beatable.

4. Sugar ants. The tiniest things, so small you can really only see this crawling speck, the body details are not visible unless you are up REALLY close. They go for crumbs and sugars, and will get into all sorts of places you think they can’t, like microwaves, cupboards, open packages of things (cereal, crackers, chips, cookies, etc), and even jars of peanut butter that are not tightened down well. Bait stations are LESS effective with these than with other ants, but they do still have an inhibitory effect – you’ll find dead ants on the counters within 24 hours, but there will still be crawling ones too. These little things do not like LIGHT either, they tend to avoid brightly lit areas. They live outside IN THE SOIL, and when you dig or hoe the soil they will be teaming in the dirt. If you see them OUTSIDE, you will eventually have them INSIDE, so treat your foundation immediately if you see these.

5. Fire Ants. They don’t usually come in the house. But they’ll be outside in places YOU need to be, such as where you park your car, on the edges of gardens and in fields and parking strips. These diminish anywhere you water regularly, but they’ll form underground colonies of enormous size and are nearly impossible to eradicate. Insecticide granules do work somewhat, if you put a cup or two of them on the top of the mound.

Ok, so we begin with a process to eliminate them in the house. We want to do it safely, so we progress from least harmful (to us), and least troublesome, to most effective. And we ALWAYS have to progress.

1. Ant Bait Stations. Put them everywhere. They do help deter. But they won’t remove an infestation completely. We do it anyway, because it is all part of the entire solution.

2. Sticky Traps. The mousetrap kind. Fold it into a box, and leave it on the countertop, or in the corner on the floor, in the cupboard, etc. Remember, FOLD it for insects, LAY IT FLAT for mice, and don’t bother for spiders, they never go in them. BE CAREFUL to not put these anywhere that FOOD might absorb odors from them, the odors are toxic, and they DO smell like insecticide.

3. A cup of water in the microwave, run it for 2 minutes if you have them there. Cook those puppies and then clean your microwave. That will get them out of there.

4. If they are in the fridge, clean the fridge, make sure everything is contained and enclosed.

5. Clean up all the crumbs and keep your countertops and floors clean. Clean as you go, and avoid messes as much as you can, and this becomes MUCH easier. Put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher if you have one, so there aren’t any on the counter. Just like roaches, eliminate the food sources.

6. Use granulated lawn and garden insecticide around the foundation of your house. Encircle the whole thing. Use a disposable cup and just dip and sprinkle the stuff fairly liberally around the foundation. This WORKS long term to kill the SOURCE of the ants. You WILL have to repeat the application, at least one or two times over the warmer months. You’ll have to repeat it MORE in WET WEATHER than where it is dry.

7. It always comes to this… You have to spray. You do NOT have to bomb. Use Raid or Hot Shot, or some other kind of spray insect killer. Yes, it always says do not use it in a kitchen, but you HAVE to do so, or you can’t get rid of the nasty little insects. For ants, just spray around the baseboards of the kitchen, under the kickplates of your cabinets, behind the stove and fridge right down along the edge of the floor or wall. Again, just lay down a barrier so they can’t get around down there, and they generally won’t get up higher. This is a last resort for me, I’m very chemically sensitive. Best to do this with Windows and Doors open for good air circulation. The smell will die down in a few days. It lasts a while – you will probably have to do it again though.

8. If you have holes in the floor or walls, plug them. Sometimes we have a hole left from having removed natural gas or electrical, or sometimes we have drains or pipes that have space around the piping that lets insects (or mice) in. Plug that. Use something like Great Stuff, or Silicone Caulk, or a piece of a kitchen cutting mat cut to plug a hole and glued in hard. This is all happening where nobody is going to see it, and if you want to replace drywall or flooring, go ahead, but that’s a lot of work and expense to plug a small hole so ants can’t get in through it.

Forget those FaceBook remedies like Cornmeal or Borax. They DO NOT WORK. As in, they NEVER worked, someone MADE IT UP, and they never CAN work. The ants just eat the cornmeal, they like it. They just eat a portion of the Borax, and ignore the rest, or push it aside if you put it on an ant mound.

This has always been a seasonal thing, once the weather cools again for winter, they are gone again. We battle them aggressively once or twice a year, and the rest of the year you may find one or two, but not a lot of them, and not an infestation that is a major problem.

When it is a major problem, we end up having to spray. Take precautions when you have to do it. it can have the same effect on YOU as it does on the insects if you are exposed to very much of it.

The type of ants we got this time were new territory, but the process was not. At least I KNEW what to do, and how to conquer.