The Ants

One of the posts that I saved from my blog journal was about our ant problem. There are SO MANY creepy crawly bugs in our yard/house. It really became a problem last summer, when we discovered a line of ants from the side door, which goes out of our kitchen in between the house and garage in a breezeway that leads to the backyard, all the way through our daughter's room (connected to the kitchen by a pocket door) down the hall a couple of feet and to the bathroom. Needless to say, I did NOT want ants trailing through half of our house, especially the half that my daughter lives and sleeps in. I don't remember exactly what we did, other than vacuum up the ants, last year, but this summer, they came back in FULL FORCE.

One thing that kills ant colonies is boric acid. This is found in green (Granny Smith) apples, mostly. Also in the ant poison, Borax, but that is quite concentrated and poisonous, so we opted to try the apples first. The method is simple: you cut little pieces of Granny Smith apple and spread it around where the ants are coming into the house. They take the apple pieces back to the colony. They eat the apple. They all die. At least, that's the thought. What's great is that they never wise up to this approach, so you can keep doing it until they stop coming back for the apple, meaning they either all died or moved their colony.

This kind of worked. Stopped them coming all the way into the kitchen, but I think that was because the apple was in between the storm door and main door, so they just stuck to there. I think the colony is... well, huge. So, didn't quite kill it.

We then got those little ant "house" things that you put around... I think they basically do the same thing as the boric acid/apple, but are more poisonous and work a little bit more succinctly. Either way, that seemed to stop them coming into the side door. We also put some around the toilet in the bathroom. That took a lot longer to get rid of... we have no idea where they were coming from, but apparently not just from the kitchen side door.

The big problem came later, when we were eating breakfast in our living room, if you can call it that. Basically it's the room you walk into when you come into our house, and it's probably 12x12 or so... quite small. Our carpet is Berber style, and has cream, tan, brown and grey in it... My daughter mentioned that there was an ant. When we looked, we saw 30 or 40 ants running in the opposite direction of our inquiries, toward the corner of the room. They were coming in under the carpet, somewhere where the foundation of the house meets the wood of the house. Lovely. I had to vacuum for what seemed like an hour to get them all up. When I vacuumed the corner, I could see there were ants being pulled into the vacuum that hadn't quite made it into the room yet.

EEW.

So, we had to do something a little different. My husband bought a product called diatomaceous earth. Diatomaceous earth (pronounced /ˌdaɪ.ətɵˌmeɪʃəs ˈɜrθ/) also known as diatomite or kieselgur, is a naturally occurring, soft, siliceous sedimentary rock that is easily crumbled into a fine white to off-white powder. It works by sucking the moisture from the waxy outer layer of insects' exoskeletons, dehydrating them and killing them. It is not very harmful to humans, but you don't want to breath it in or get it in your eyes when you are handling it, as it can be extremely irritating and dehydrate certain organs in our bodies as well. There are other uses for this "diatomite" stuff, too, I guess, but I don't know that much about it. Basically, you sprinkle this stuff around where there's a problem: we put it into that crack on the outside corner of our house. Haven't had any ants come in since.

We also used the diatomite on a huge ant hill we found outside, not too far away from our side kitchen door. The ants simply picked up and moved... but at least they are now 20 or 30 feet farther away from our door and much less likely to come back that way.

We haven't had any any problems recently, thank goodness. I hate ants in the house! Eeew!

But, we have had DRAIN FLIES.

If anyone has any really good way to avoid or get rid of drain flies, let me know. Right now, we're just keeping the drains plugged and full of about an inch of water, so they can't get down there to reproduce, and we are even more diligent about cleaning our dishes and messes up immediately so they have nothing to eat. Seems we get those every year, no matter what we do. Tips appreciated.

As for the wolf spiders and orb weavers, the little beetles and waterbugs, silverfish, house centipedes, regular centipedes, and the CRAZY amount of gold, blue, and green house flies we have... well, I guess those are things we'll just have to live with. And kill along the way, in the case of the houseflies, centipedes and silverfish. Something I hate about as much as ants? Flies...