Stage one of my war on ants:
Stage zero was spraying the floor and doorway with vinegar, which we tried to no avail last night. This morning, they were swarming all over the floor, and had gotten up onto part of our counter as well. My brain a little crazy from the sight of ants on my kitchen counter, I decided to try to make my floor smell worse. I grabbed the Fantastik, the cleaner that I hate so much, and that makes me feel sick. I figured that ants wouldn't be attracted to Fantastik. It turns out that it kills them on contact. I sprayed the floor and the counters with that stuff. The problem was that it didn't really deter ants from coming under the door; it just killed them when I sprayed them.
Stage two:
In the comments of my previous post, the lovely Tabitha Grimalkin suggested sprinkling cayenne pepper where the ants were coming in. We tried it as soon as I read the suggestion. That worked much better, for keeping the ants outside. Most ants fled the cayenne immediately, except for this one hardcore ant who spent the entire day hanging out on the cayenne. He could've wandered off the pepper and onto the bare floor, but he wanted to show us that we couldn't stop him! He liked spicy peppers!
Crazy Pepper Ant notwithstanding, the pepper served as the perfect deterrent while we ran errands, including an important stop at A Certain Large Hardware Store. We bought this:
Stage three (and hopefully the final one): Yes, we've come to the place where we make minor improvements to our apartment without asking our landlords' permission. They would've just insisted on doing it themselves, and then they'd have spent the rest of the week apologising, and we were fine. As an added bonus, drafts will no longer come in under the door. And sweeping will get easier, because those drafts used to bring bushels of dust with them.
And now the ants are staying outside, and I have conquered another enemy. Now I should attempt to devote such energy to conquering my assigned reading.
4 comments:
We have ants too. *sigh*
I'll have to try the Cayenne pepper thing.
-n
Oh my, your ant posts are cracking me up. See, my dad has for 30+ years been waging a war on ants. When I was in my teen years, if he found a few ants on the second story of the house at, say, 8 p.m., he'd get out a flashlight, walk outside, follow the trail of ants from the second-story window to the ground, then track them along the ground to their nest, which he would then attack with a shovel before pouring in all kinds of nasty granular chemicals. (Mind you, he's an environmentalist in pretty much every other way.)
Needless to say, he was discouraged when I showed him a newspaper article that stated that you couldn't get rid of an ant colony by digging up a few nests. Why not? Because this particular species of ant constituted one giant colony from Baja California to Washington state. Ha!
That's hilarious. I've been less diligent about getting rid of my household family of house spiders than I have been about keeping the ants outside. And that's all that matters to me: keeping them out. Not destroying the whole colony. (At least I'm on an island.)
But, at least the spiders mostly stay out of the way, except when they have babies in Chris's computer.
And Trillwing, I'm glad that I'm not the only one amused by my personal struggle against ants.
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