Ants are natural workers. Watching how persistently they equip their home by dragging building materials and food, many times greater than their size and weight, causes not only admiration, but even envy. However, often these cute creatures penetrate the human abode to replenish their food supplies, and sometimes settle there. On the other hand, in the garden or in the garden, these youngsters manage to grow aphids, which, living on cultivated plants, destroy them.
Preventive Ant Protection
The best remedy for ants is keeping clean. If the scout ant finds a pair of edible crumbs on the floor of your house, then he will immediately call the working ant. And if they determine that there is enough food in the house to feed the entire colony, then the whole anthill will immediately move there.
Before poisoning ants, they should limit them to the passages into the house. To do this, you can sprinkle some places of penetration with ordinary salt. The vertical planes of door jambs, windows and walls can be outlined in chalk. Ants avoid contact with calcium carbonate in the composition of chalk.
The pungent smell of citrus will frighten off insects if you pour lemon juice over door sills or spread orange peels around the base of the house. They can not stand the smell of garlic, as well as the smell of anise, onions, wormwood, fish, sunflower oil. They do not like soot and ash.
Vast surfaces can be treated with vinegar. To prevent the entry into the dishes of pets, its edges should be coated with petroleum jelly.
Ants, like all living things, cannot live without water. Therefore, for a long time leaving unattended a house in a summer cottage, it is worth blocking any access of insects to water.
Methods and means of getting rid of ants
If the ants nevertheless found a way to food supplies, then it is worth temporarily shifting them to a more inaccessible place, and here everything is thoroughly washed using detergents with a strong odor or chlorine content. After some time, the insects will forget the road and leave.
Traps are an effective way to get rid of ants. In places of active movement of insects, you can expand the adhesive tape, and for reliability, put an odorous bait nearby. With baits, you can lure ants into some kind of bowl, sponge, and then take them out into the yard or pour boiling water over them.
When they settle in the house, it becomes more difficult to drive them out. Here you need to use such an ant remedy that will affect the entire ant hill. Good poison from ants is prepared from ordinary or brewer's yeast with the addition of honey or jam. Some insects do not digest corn or wheat flour, but they eat it with pleasure or take it to an anthill, where the colony also feeds on this flour and dies from indigestion.
The anthill found in the house should be immediately destroyed by pouring nicotine water into it, which is prepared by tincture of pipe tobacco on the water for a day.
Anthills in the yard can be destroyed by pouring boiling water on them. An alternative remedy for ants is to spread gruel from ground orange and lemon peels around their home.
If the anthill is very large, then it is necessary to make a kind of crater on its top, pour baking soda into it and pour it with acetic acid. Substances and gases released during the chemical reaction will fill all the pores of the anthill, which will lead to its complete death.
The stores offer a large selection of ant remedies: crayons, gels, poisoned baits. In some cases, you should turn to the services of the sanitary and epidemiological station.
However, do not forget that in the natural balance of life, these insects are an important link. Trying another remedy for ants in your garden or in a summer cottage, first of all, you should think about whether this anthill really interferes. Is it worth it to exterminate these insects - orderlies of the forest (garden)? But will it do more harm than good?