On Mon 25 Aug 2008 07:46:33p, told us...

On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:18:05 -0500, coffee
wrote:

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:31:17 +0000, Wayne Boatwright wrote:

I posted the following to alt.lawn.home.garden, with little response.
So I thought I'd try here...

We live in the Arizona desert near Phoenix and have a significant
problem with large black ants in the yard. We have had exterminators
(costly), but they were only successful for a period of time before the
ants returned.

I had read somewhere that one could make a solution of water, sugar,
and
borax (boric acid?), which was an effective poison for ants. The
problem is that I don't know the proportions that should be used.

Can anyone here help with this? Are there other homemade options that
I
don't know about? We're trying to steer clear of commercial products,
and also stay as "green" as possible.

TIA

Its nice to "Stay Green" but you have to look at it from the side of
going to war with the Ants. We live up in Indiana with alot of large oaks
in the yard. We fight ants all the time.

If your going to really control them then you should get some type of
poison that they carry back to the nest and kill the others. Especially
the queen.

Probably the reason the exterminators where only successful for a period
of time is because they didnt use something that would be taken back to
the nest to destroy the queen and such.

We use the stakes you put in the ground with the poison in them. Havent
seen too much of the ants after we started this. Takes a week or so.

Good Luck,

coffee

That "take it back to the nest and destroy the queen" thing is largely
a myth. You can teach the ants not to eat that particular food but the
colony (or one of the princesses) will survive and they won't be
eating that bait anymore.
I had the ants so well trained here the only thing they would eat was
dog food the dog had chewed on, then I baited with that. Then they
just walked around and I never really saw them eating anything.
Finally I tracked down the nest and dosed them with Ortho Ant and
Termite ... with extreme prejudice. (3 gallons of mix at label
strength) I haven't seen them for a while now.


I'll have to take a look at that stuff. Thanks!

--
Wayne Boatwright

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