Homemade Ant Killer

I can't remember when it started. I don't remember what Mike was doing in our bathroom. I do vaguely remember one day noting ants around the bathroom. Not enough to bother me, but enough for me to notice. Until (and there's always an until), I started putting on my work pants and ended up getting bitten by fire ants. Needless to say Mike used Raid on the bathroom real fast. And it got rid of the ants... for a while... But while Raid works fast it doesn't get rid of the source and the ants always seem to come back, no matter how many times you spray for them.

And as my luck would have it, I'd recently stumbled across a couple of homemade ant killers on Pinterest. (And yes that really is my life works. Throw it out to the universe and the universe will give you just what you need. Some people call it the secret or God. We call it the Universe). So for this Try Me! Tuesday, I decided that I would not only try homemade ant killers; I would also see which homemade ant killer works better

The Project:

Try Homemade Ant Killer; see if they work and which one works best

For this project I tested out two different homemade ant killers. You can find instructions for them:

1. Powder Sugar/ Baking Soda Method

from Apartment Therapy

2. Sugar, Borax and Cotton Ball Method

from Freebie Finding Mom

Experiments and Results

Apartment Therapy promises that it quickly. I either have really lazy ants or I just needed to get rid of their other food source. Turn out to be the latter. I got mediocre results for a couple of days, until I started leaving my work shoes out by the kitchen again. It seems denying the ants a food source caused more of them to turn to the food I made for them.

And once I got them eating the ant killers, I decided it was time to experiment with them.

Out of all the projects I've made this is one I tried my best to turn into a science project. I made both of them per the instructions and then tried mixing and matching to see which would get the best results.

The only result I got was that it was a stupid idea. I couldn't even get an ant to check out my mixed versions of the ant killers. And in the end I just ended up with powder sugar icing on cotton balls. Total disaster, but I guess that's the point of this blog. Let me do all the stupid things so you don't have to.

Once I realized that all of those other homemade ant killers weren't attracting any ants, I got rid of them and just put the two original ant killers head to head.

And what I found out kind of shocked me. I couldn't get an ant to even come near the cotton balls ant killers (I mean, not that I watched them all the time). 

The ants however love the powder sugar/baking soda mixture. Especially late at night (I guess my ants love their late night sugar fix too!). I'm not sure that's it's killing them though. When they come to get it there seems to be an line of them coming and going from the mixture, 

but they also are always in my work pants when I leave them on the bathroom floor. (I know someone is what you're thinking, then just don't leave your pants on the floor. Problem solved! But then I would still have the ants taking over my bathroom).

Conclusion:

Last night I was all set to say how determined I was to make one of these methods work and how happy I was to see a pile of ants in the powder sugar/ baking soda mixture, but then I watched my ants last night before I went to bed. There was a decent amount roaming around looking for food and only a couple of them were in the powder sugar/baking soda mixture.  

This all lead me to one conclusion. These homemade ant killers seem nice, but they don't really work. So I guess Mike is right. The best way to get rid of ants is to just keeping using Raid on them until they are no longer an issue.

(I'm still optimistic that I can find an all natural ant killer though... don't tell Mike)