On Oct 15, 10:53*am, "AngryOldWhiteGuy"
wrote:
wrote in message

news
On 10/14/2010 9:47 PM, Bob-tx wrote:

"Alex" wrote in message
....
We have a crazy problem with fire ants in our 6 month old house. It
started out a month ago when we found the garbage in our master bath

We have a house on a slab in North Texas - near Dallas - it's an older
house, and we moved in about 7 years ago. *Before we moved in, I gave the
entire inside of the house a good spraying of Home Defense or something like
that, and on the outside of the house I put down a liberal dose of *the
granules that you can put on your lawn with a broadcast spreader or you can
spread them around the perimiter of the house. *But those remedies arr
relatively short-lived - they'll kill what's there, but there's not a real
long kikk effect (not more than 3 - 6 months).

What I believe made the biggest difference was putting some of that white or
blue roach powder (it's good for ants, too) around any area that I could get
to where a pipe comes up through the slab - behind bathroom cabinets, under
the kitchen sink, under kitchen cabinets, behind the clothes washer, behind
the fridge, and behind the stove, etc. - as long as it stays dry, it seems
to keep the crawling things at bay - we haven't seen but a couple of ants in
the 7 years we've been in the house. *You can spray the powder into areas
where you can't see - like into the hole in the back of the bathroom cabinet
where the water pipes come in to service the sink.

I have recently seen very good results with Terro, too - it seems to work
inside and outside - it's a bait that they take back to the nest, but
suprisingly, it, too is based on borax - like the roach powder.

We have small black ants that always want to come in the house. They
will setup a nest almost anywhere in just a day or two. Under a
potted plant on the deck, anything. I bait with homemade bait mixture
using karo and borax. The formula is all over the web. Sometimes you
have to tweak the borax amount. Less takes longer to kill them but
too much and they will avoid it. They take it back to the nest and in
a few days that's the end of them. I just put a blob on a square of
cardboard and put it as close to the entry point as possible. Once
they find that as a food source they don't wander around anymore, they
just go back and forth to that. In a couple days they stop showing
up. If sugar doesn't interest them you can substitute peanut butter
for the karo. All ants will go for sugar or protein. It's super
cheap too.