It is said that there are two kinds of houses....Those that have carpenter
ants and those that will have carpenter ants.....

I find that sprays don't work with carpenter ants becasue you never get the
nest. Baits work much better but take a longer time to work. HD sells
Combat gel which is what I prefer. You need to do some sleuthing and
identify the ant trails and put the bait along them. If you're good you can
follow the trails back to the nest and then maybe use a spray on the nest
but you usually still don't get the queen. Baits will get the queen.

Once you get them out of your house than use a spray to spray a 3ft
perimeter around the outside of your house. This will keep them out. I
prefer diazinon as a spray but since you can't buy it anymore, I prefer
anything that doesn't use permithin or its relatives. THey are just too
short lived and you end up spraying once a month. IF you can find where they
are entering the house than just spray a 10 ft by 3 ft strip in front of
that point. My ants seem to be creatures of habit and year after year they
enter thru the same point. Makes it kind of easy.

I prefer to not use insecticides inside the house but if you were forced to,
I would use permithin because of its relatively low toxicity and short life
span.


"blueman" wrote in message
...
We seem (like many in our neighborhood) to have a nagging number of
Carpenter ants around our New England house.

We bought Home Depot's "best" which supposedly "kills on contact",
however, the ants seemed to just swim through the stuff.

What are your recommendations for the most effective *consumer* spray
that effectively can be used against Carpenter ants? (both inside and
outside).

My perhaps faulty assumption is that anything sold nowadays to
consumers will be reasonably safe.