Well they seem to be coming from underground burrows. I live in the basement level of an apartment complex, so they find ways to sneak in through the walls, but I haven't located their burrows. I asked the apartment manager to put down some poisoned bait, but since we don't know where the damn things are nesting, its kind of a spray and pray situation.
I'm just glad they are black ants and not fire ants. Doesn't mean I like them in my house, crawling on my face while I'm asleep, though.
A) Wipe out their scent trails. Soap and water will do the trick. It won't stop them forever but it'll delay them.
B) Block their entrance points. Usually they'll come through a window or a door, but there can also be cracks in your walls. Whatever the case, find those point and block them. I find that a line of bleach powder will create an impassable wall (of poison).
C) Uh... I can't think of a third thing but if I don't have one then dividing the first two points into A and B seems pointless.
edited 24th Mar '12 4:10:26 PM by Clarste
I live right off a park with woods to one side and I get ants where I live too. Lowes (and i suppose a lot of other places) Lowes is just where we get the stuff) has like this powder you spread around the outside of your house that kills them and also like a large black syringe that shoots out this gold colored goop that tasts sweet to them and they take it back to the nest and it kills the queen. (you shoot that stuff out onto a piece of cardboard and just leave it sit)
Devypu's~ Big Pony :3We once had a colony of ghost ants living in a picture frame that hung on our wall. Had us mystified for a long time until somebody bumped the it accidentally. Vinegar is quite effective at messing up their scent trails, if you can stand the smell yourself. Besides that, you either have to find their colony and kill it or just seal off their entry points and hope for the best.
edited 25th Mar '12 11:35:22 AM by EdwardsGrizzly
<><And here I've been thinking I was the only one. My family has to deal with these guys every spring. We've found that spraying window cleaner on them works like a charm.
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My house is getting overrun with ants! At first it was one or two scouts, but now it seems that no matter how much poison I throw at them, they pull a tusken raider on me and come back in greater numbers. There were even a few crawling on my face when I woke up this morning!
I don't know what they want, nor how to get them to go away. I've cleaned every last inch of my house, so there's no crumbs or little snacks around that would attract them. They seem mostly interested in areas where I splashed water, like around my shower, so my guess is maybe they are going after the invisible salt crystals left behind by evaporation (the scary thing is that means the ants that were on my face were after my tears...), but it isn't like I can really do anything about that.
What should I do?