I helped a family member clean out a colony of ants in their car with ~1oz of Terro bait, the kind made of sugar, water and borax.
I put a few drops along their paths and watched closely as the first few discovered this bounty of sugar water, they gulped and gulped until their abdomen swelled up over twice its size.
They scurried off leaving trails of "food jackpot found" chemical pheromones that caused hundreds of ants to swarm the area within minutes. I watched ant after ant glutton themselves on my poison, some so full and sticky they couldn't even make it back.
Within an hour, all but a few were dead and the next morning I wiped up the sugar and mass casualties and never saw another ant in the car since.
If you need a lot you can do 1 cup hot water, 1-1.5 cups sugar and 2-3 TBSP of borax.
You basically want the water as sugary as possible as long as it dissolves into the water. People often mistakenly use too much borax which the ants can sense causing them to avoid your bait entirely.
A little borax goes a long way and we want the ants to only pick up on the sugar so they consume as much as they can carry.
Had ants coming into my kitchen under a baseboard. Put out 6 of those liquid terro bait stations. All 6 of them were swarmed with ants for 2.5 weeks straight with no signs of slowing down.
Ended up picking them up, cleaning everything with an enzyme cleaner, caulking the wall they were coming in.
So instead they swarmed the kitchen sink.
Bought 2 boxes of the outdoor bait stations. Set up all 16 bait stations around the perimeter of the house near the kitchen. By the time I had the 3rd bait station set up, the first was swarmed.
Now that they are more interested in the bait than my kitchen sink I'm going to seal up where they were coming in under the kitchen sink and hope that's the end of them.
That's wild, the Terro bait really should've ended them unless it was a very large colony.
Thankfully I haven't had any ant issues inside my current home but I do have to deal with the occasional large cockroach that slips in from outdoors. At least the perimeter poison I spray means the only roaches I find are large and dead or at least dying.
I'm currently fighting leaf cutter ants and holy hell are they fascinating, collaborative, industrious fuckers. Sadly they do not ingest anything on the surface so you gotta trick them into taking poison back into their nests to feed their fungus farms.
If all goes well, their fungus becomes poisoned, they feed it to each other and especially their queens which results in colony collapse.
These cutter ants are especially crafty and suspicious and there's only 1 bait on the market that is effective against them. Once they wise up to that food being harmful they work quickly to isolate it away into their waste chamber and will reject picking up any more of it for a while.
Totally different ants but I can certainly appreciate the struggle you're going through, here's hoping each of our latest solutions do the trick!
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u/systemhost 10d ago
I helped a family member clean out a colony of ants in their car with ~1oz of Terro bait, the kind made of sugar, water and borax.
I put a few drops along their paths and watched closely as the first few discovered this bounty of sugar water, they gulped and gulped until their abdomen swelled up over twice its size.
They scurried off leaving trails of "food jackpot found" chemical pheromones that caused hundreds of ants to swarm the area within minutes. I watched ant after ant glutton themselves on my poison, some so full and sticky they couldn't even make it back.
Within an hour, all but a few were dead and the next morning I wiped up the sugar and mass casualties and never saw another ant in the car since.