During the late spring and summer periods, there's a potential intruder in our homes that we always have to find ways to get rid of - that pesky ant.
We just went through that problem this year, and they were the worst we have ever experienced in the home.
Here's what we did to get rid of the ants completely
Instructions
1. What has to be done before anything else is identify the source of the ants entrance into your home.
You also want to find the trail they follow, as ants in general leave a scent which the other ants follow. That's why you have that long line of them when you see them travel.
2. So depending on where they're entering in the house and where they're going, that determines the strategy you'll use to combat them. Normally the destination is the kitchen area, as they're going to get the crumbs and food that may be on the floor or counters, or possibly temporarily in the sink or garbage.
This of course depends upon whether the kitchen or dining room is the place you eat. These days families eat in a variety of places in the home, including many times in their bedrooms, especially with teens.
The point is to simply find it so you know where you need to apply the remedy.
3. Now once you find where the ants are coming in and going, you can start formulating your strategy.
There are two things to consider here.
1. What type of floor do you have? Is it a flat surface or carpet?
2. Are the ants coming in through something like a light switch cover.
4. Before we go on, let me reveal this natural remedy to an ant infestation: it's cinnamon. If you've never heard a hint of this before, it's probably a shock to you.
More specifically, it's ground cinnamon, but that's only because of the ease of application, not necessarily because it's the ground part alone that is the key; although hints that the way ground cinnamon lays on a floor or is put on other surfaces may be the key to why they keep ants away.
All I know is they don't like to walk on the stuff, and that's good enough for me.
5. While we have both carpeted and non-carpeted floors in our home, the ants were primarily traveling on the carpeted area.
So what you do is sprinkle the cinnamon at the bottom of areas you found they travel on. This is done along the wall bottoms or in corners primarily.
In the case of carpet, picture if you didn't move a sofa to clean behind you corners for a while. Have you ever taken your hand and softly wiped it across the dust to remove the concentration? That's what we did when sprinkling the cinnamon on the carpet.
The only concern I would have is if you may have white carpet. You would want to test a small, out of the way place to see if it stains at all. On our carpet, which isn't dark, there is no signs of coloring or staining at all, so that shouldn't be a problem, but it's just a thought to consider just in case.
As far as the non-carpeted areas of the floor, we did apply it by simply sprinkling it on the edges of the walls and corners and left it there.
6. What about the place they were entering in?
In our case, it was through a light switch area. So what we did was remove the covering and take the insulated piece behind it and sprinkle it with cinnamon. It literally stopped them immediately from coming into the house. We haven't had a problem for over a week.
In other words, they were walking over that insulated piece to enter the home. They simply will not do that any longer.
Keep in mind that we were having an ant infestation. There were hundreds all over the place in any area that there may have been food at.
If you find ants coming in through other areas such as windows, if you have insulation, sprinkling cinnamon on it will be a great deterrent from them coming in.
7. The question may arise as to why we sprinkled cinnamon on their travel routes, if we stopped them from coming in.
First, there were still ants already in the house, so we had to deal with them. This took away their going to the areas they were looking for food.
And if the ants tried an alternative route, we would have measures in place to combat them once they entered. So far that hasn't been a problem.
8. What types of ants did it stop?
The good news on the ant control side, is that we actually had two different types of ants we needed to get rid of, so the cinnamon pest control strategy worked on both.
There were the tiny red ants you always see scurrying around, and we also had those medium-sized black ants; not those huge ones, but those about a quarter of an inch long.
Neither of those colonies have been in the house since we put down the cinnamon.
Tags: they were, ants coming, ants coming through, area what, combat them, coming through, from coming