During the warm spring and summer months, you may notice an increase in the number of ants inside your home. Homeowners, landlords, and business owners alike often find it difficult to prevent these tiny insects from getting in. Fortunately, there are several common home remedies for you to know how to get rid of ants that are quite effective.
1. Lemon Juice
While it doesn’t ᴋɪʟʟ the ants in their tracks, lemon will act as a natural repellent and keep ants away. That’s because the acidity and smell of lemon affect an ant’s ability to smell and find its original path.
Whenever ants enter a home and find a food source, they leave behind a trail of pheromones. These chemicals let other ants know that there’s food ahead. But lemon juice interferes with the ant’s ability to pick up on the scent trail. If applied in the right places, ants won’t know how to get back in, or how to find the trail.
The citrus smell should also deter them from making a new scent trail.
How to Apply:
Put lemon juice in a spray bottle and spray the entry points to your home. Apply this solution daily to any spot that you’ve seen ants entering and exiting your home.
You can also soak cotton balls in lemon juice, and place them near entry points and other areas where you see ant activity.
For this remedy, you can use freshly-squeezed lemon juice, or the bottled lemon juice you find in the grocery store. The bottled variety is more convenient, and you won’t have to waste fresh lemons on those pesky ants.
2. Vinegar
Vinegar is a powerful cleaner and insect repellent. It can also help eliminate ant trails. Because it’s safe and natural, you can use vinegar to clean counters, floors and other hard surfaces.
Yes, your home will smell like vinegar, but the smell won’t last long. It’s worth the inconvenience to keep ants away.
Nests that are visible can also be soaked with vinegar to remedy the problem.
If you don’t necessarily want to ᴋɪʟʟ the ants but want to evict them from your home, repellents are a fast and easy way to make the ants leave.
3. Boiling Water and Soap
These two ultra-common household ingredients can be used to demolish any ant mound in your yard. If you know the location of the nest or mound, merely apply this mixture and instantly ᴋɪʟʟ the ants inside.
It’s a gruesome remedy, but it will work. The combination of boiling hot water and soap will both drown and “cook” the ants. The key most important thing is to make sure that the solution reaches the queen. Otherwise, you may need to re-apply it a few times until all of the ants are ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.
How to Apply:
Boil a pot of water and add dish soap to it. Remove the pot from the stove (using an oven-mitt) and take the water outside to the mound.
Carefully pour the water and soap mixture directly onto the hill, making sure not to splash yourself and scald yourself in the process. This is a simple-yet-effective way to ᴋɪʟʟ the ants in your yard immediately.
4. Chalk
Chalk is an old ant remedy that your grandmother and great-grandmother probably used. Ants don’t like walking through this powdery substance.
Simply draw a line of chalk along entry points, like window sills and doorways. You can use old-fashioned school board chalk, or you can buy the powder sold in home improvement stores. The kind sold in stores comes in a squeeze bottle that makes it easy to apply.
5. Powdered Sugar and Baking Soda
Similar to the borax mixture, this combination will slowly ᴋɪʟʟ the ants over time. Ant species that are attracted to sugar will ingest it with the baking soda.
Ants have a naturally-occurring acidic substance in their bodies that will react with the baking soda and will ᴅɪᴇ. This home remedy ant-killer is extremely effective because the ants will often carry this food source back to the colony to be consumed by the queen and other ants.
How to Apply:
Mix baking soda, powdered sugar and just enough water to make a paste. Apply the paste to cardboard or paper, and place it near the ants’ entry points in your home.
Be diligent and re-apply the bait as needed until the entire nest is wiped out.
References: pestwiki.com
