Fighting ants in an apartment and in a garden plot: methods and means

Many owners of gardens and summer cottages have experienced ants in their own experience. These small-sized annoying insects can also settle in city apartments, creating a lot of problems. Therefore, the question of how to get rid of ants remains relevant. We offer to get acquainted with the most effective ways that both summer residents and residents can use.

Insect Harm

Ant colonies cause many to associate with a well-established labor process and amazing performance. But the owners of garden plots, gardens, summer cottages, greenhouses are well aware that these small insects can do great harm. What does it consist of:

• Destruction of seeds and seedlings.
• Infection of fruit trees and shrubs with parasites - aphids, which for the ants themselves are a kind of "dairy cows."
• Colonies cause significant damage to the crop by absorbing berries and tubers. Harvest of strawberries and strawberries is especially affected by them.
• They eat petals and flower buds, depriving the garden of its main decoration.
• Hard-working insects can destroy the root system of plants.
• Often they are carriers of diseases that affect fruit crops.
• Insects are also very harmful to houses, since as a result of their life activity they spoil the wooden elements of the building, giving them rottenness and fragility.
• Finally, these insects bite rather painfully.

That is why the fight against ants is necessary both in the greenhouse and in the summer cottage as a whole. We offer you to get acquainted with the most effective ways, both from a series of professional tools, and from the category of craftsmen's advice.

Benefit

In fairness, it should be noted that small insects can also benefit gardeners and gardeners:

• Due to their swarming in the ground, they loosen the upper layers of the soil, making it easier for roots to get oxygen.
• Often destroy some pests - slug larvae, ticks.

But, despite these points, insects do more harm than good, therefore, effective remedies for ants should be in the arsenal of every summer resident.

Basic Rules

To protect your site from uninvited guests or get rid of them, you must choose one of two methods:

• Prevention Prevent the appearance of pests in the garden or greenhouse.
• Destruction. It is used if insects have already placed an ant hill among the beds and damage the crop.

Sometimes it becomes necessary to destroy the entire anthill at once, then it is poured with boiling water or kerosene, covered with hot ash or use a special poisonous agent.

An easy way to quickly destroy an ant hill is to fill it with such a mixture:

• Water - 5 l.
• Sunflower oil - 1 cup.
• Liquid soap - 1 cup.
• Vinegar - 1 cup.

After watering the house with this mixture, it is necessary to cover it for 24 hours with plastic wrap - and the colony is doomed.

Pros and cons of various means

There are a lot of tools that will help solve the problem, these are recipes from the piggy bank of folk wisdom, and professional tools. In the table, we present their comparative characteristics.

As you can see, each of the means to combat ants has both strengths and weaknesses. You can begin to act with the use of folk methods, but if they prove to be ineffective, you have to take advantage of the achievements of the chemical industry. Next, we consider these methods in more detail.

Trap making

The easiest way to deal with ants is bait and traps, which can be done independently from practically available tools, or purchased at specialized points of sale. There are many of them:

• Hunting belts. They are designed to protect young trees and shrubs, not only from the ants themselves, but also from their aphids.
• Velcro is attached to the trunk, and insect pests stick firmly to its surface. It is enough for the owner to simply remove the used tape and destroy it. The best time to use such a tool is the first half of March. Replacement of the "belt" is carried out in October.

For a homemade trap, you can use cans filled with sweet - sugar, jam. They are placed on the site, equipped with "bridges" of straw, so that insects could easily get there. They cannot get out of the sweet captivity.

How to make a bait

Effective insect control can also be carried out with the help of baits, which are very easy to prepare. Let's get acquainted with several options:

• The honey and sponge bait is very simple. Soak a regular sponge for washing dishes (you can use the old one) with honey, slightly diluted with water, and place in a place of accumulation of insects. When small pests stick around it in a dense layer, it is enough to pour boiling water over the sponge, destroying them.
• Almost any means can be used as bait: jars from under cooking, meat bones. All this will cause interest in insects, and the owner will only have to wait until it is full and destroy the pests.

Among the advantages of using traps include:

• Ease of use.
• Complete safety for both plants and people.
• Affordable price.

There is only one drawback - they will help in protecting individual crops, trees, beds, but they will not be able to cope with a large colony.

Poison Bait

If the previously described products attracted the attention of insects, then other recipes will help to destroy them, therefore they are more effective in combating ants in the garden. There are a very large number of them, we offer to get acquainted with the most useful recipes.

The necessary components are:

• 1 tbsp. l Sahara.
• 2 tbsp. l boiling water.
• 1/3 tsp Boers.
• 1 tsp honey.

The components are mixed, the borax needs to be added only after the liquid with the sugar dissolved in it cools down. The bait is laid out in places of accumulation of pests, replacement should be made daily.

Another effective way to make a trap is to mix a raw egg, 1 tsp. Boers, ½ tsp red pepper. To shape the trap, mix it with flour and mold a ball. Put the resulting product in places where insects were observed. It will help in the fight against ants in the country.

An equally simple recipe is as follows. Necessary components:

• ½ tsp Boers.
• 2 tbsp. l minced meat.

The poison is laid out in the immediate vicinity of the anthill, a new portion is placed after the complete destruction of the old.

Yeast based product

In the fight against ants, home-made yeast-based products have proven themselves well. Summer residents tired of annoying insects can use this recipe:

• Mix 1 tbsp. l yeast, 1 tbsp. l jam and dilute them with water until a thick mass resembles a cream.
• Place the resulting substance on a saucer (or cardboard).
• Arrange such traps in those places where there is an accumulation of insects.

After a short time, the ants on the site will become much smaller, because the yeast is fatal to their digestive system.

The fight against garden ants with folk remedies most often bears fruit, especially if the problem has not been launched and the colony has not grown to enormous proportions. If time is lost, then such baits are unlikely to help, and the achievements of the chemical industry will have to be trusted.

Professional Tools

If the above-described folk recipes did not help in the fight against ants, one thing remains - to use pesticides. It can be such chemicals:

• Muratsid.
• "Ant-eater".
• "Ant".
• Thunder-2.
• "Summer resident".
• "Trinol".
• "Phenaxin".
• Fitan.
• "Death to pests."

The active component contained in them - diazinon - penetrates the nervous system of insects, paralyzes them and causes death. The advantages of such drugs include their high efficiency, as well as the ability to destroy not only adults, but also larvae. Relapse is almost completely excluded. But do not forget that working with poisons can have a negative effect on the crop, which, under the influence of chemicals, will lose its ecological purity.

Often, summer residents use insecticidal gels that are easy to use, have a prolonged effect.

Ways to save trees

Many gardeners are wondering how to get rid of ants that attacked fruit trees. We will get acquainted with the most popular methods of protection. There are several of them:

• Wrap the tree trunk with sharp-edged foil, from which you should build something like a skirt. Small insects are unable to overcome such a barrier.
• Lubricate the trunk with birch tar, the smell of which the pests do not tolerate.
• The winding of a sheepskin with wool outside has proven itself well. The inside should be pre-treated with carbolic acid.
• In early spring, each trunk should be treated with lime, this is a very effective preventive measure.

You can do something simpler - wrap the tops of tomatoes around the trunk, spread them on garden paths, this will help reduce the number of pests on the site.

Fight in the apartment

Consider how to get rid of ants in an apartment. The action scheme is in many ways similar to the methods of struggle at the summer cottage:

• Try traps and lures first.
• If they did not help, you can use yeast, borax.
• In the most advanced cases, you will have to turn to chemicals.

In an apartment, it is best to use Velcro traps, which were described earlier. They are placed on ant trails, then you should wait for a while until the "prey" is caught, then just remove the tape and throw it away. It is not necessary to use a purchased trap, to make it simple enough with your own hands, using double-sided tape and placing sweet lures next to it: drops of jam, sugar, berries. It will turn out a simple and effective tool for combating ants.

You can also use these recipes:

• To soften the baking in milk, sprinkle it with boric acid and place on the ant trails.
• Mix thick honey with acid; put these baits in places where there is an accumulation of insects.

To get a quick result, the bait should be updated daily.

On the video you can get acquainted with some more ways of struggle.

Preventive measures

Many will agree that preventing a problem is often easier than solving it. Therefore, the best remedy for ants is prevention. In the conditions of a city apartment or a private house, it is easy to use the following methods:

• Arrange in “dangerous” places (near ventilation, cracks in the walls, cracks in the floor) bunches of herbs that are not liked by insects: elderberries, wormwood, tansy, chamomile, mint. You can make them fragrant bouquets, which the owner himself will not bring any discomfort, and ants will be forced to stay at a distance.
• Around the perimeter of the house, you can sprinkle pepper with a thin layer, which acts annoyingly on insects. They almost never cross the Pepper Circle, therefore ants will not appear in the apartment.
• If there is a danger of the appearance of ants in the house (for example, they have already attacked the apartment of neighbors), urgent measures should be taken. So, the floor can be washed using products that insects cannot tolerate. This is vinegar, ammonia. After washing the floors, wiping furniture, walls, especially carefully processing the corners, you can be calm - pests are unlikely to venture into the house.
• Having rubbed the windowsill with the arrows of garlic, the walls near the cracks, cracks in the floor, you can be sure that pests will not pass here. The aroma of garlic they can not stand. However, this simple remedy has a significant drawback - many owners also hate the smell of this fruit. Instead of garlic, you can use a spicy oriental spice - cinnamon.

In private homes, you can plant calendula bushes, parsley, mint around the perimeter - these plants will play the role of a living barrier.

Fighting ants in a summer cottage and in an apartment is a difficult matter, often many methods turn out to be useless, while others bring only temporary results. Therefore, one must be patient, try, experiment, observe. And pests will certainly be expelled.