Winter is coming. I can tell because the ants are back, looking for food. Last night they found my honey stash. I had several jars of honey in the cupboard (including about a third of a jar left of the famed chocolate honey). They found it all, the little bastards. Obviously the jar manufacturers need to do some work on their seals, since all but one unopened jar was penetrated.
Time to start religiously wiping down surfaces and sealing sticky things shut tight/in the fridge for a while…
16 replies on “The ants are back”
All over our kitchen bench too! I cleaned it on the weekend, and bug sprayed bits, but have had to do so every morning since. Nasty buggers.
Many floors above ground, an army arrived and stayed for a couple of hours last year and then just vanished as quickly as they arrived.
Btw, they like hair removal wax too, so pop that into the fridge as well Daniel. :)
Where are the photo’s?
I just have a nice stream of ant’s going through my shed. Bummber.
Mate of mine got a lollypop from the cubboard and started eating it. At the end it exploded in powder. Turned out to be ants. They had crawled up the white tube and eaten the lollypop from inside out.
Boy, does that ever sound like an urban legend.
All my spiders have come out, and a few frogs, but no ants. Maybe the frogs have stolen them? I want my ants, dammit.
My letterbox is crawling with them, I can’t understand it. It’s been months since the Chrisco delivery.
Take 20 ml of that wasted honey, add one drop of frontline (that’s the dog flea treatment) and put a drop or two on the ant trails. Fipronil (the main active ingredient in frontline) is a great ant killer. Don’t be tempted to use more than a drop per 20ml, or they won’t take it back to feed the nest. I know you don’t have a dog – but some dog owning acquaintance will spare you a drop if you ask nicely. Don’t put it where it will inadvertently get eaten by you or your family though!
You may already know this but standing the jar in a dish of water prevents the ants getting to it (almost 100% effective) An old chinese/marg container will do the trick.
Also a few cloves sprinkled around the suspected entry point deters almost all ants. (sachet from the supermarket will set you back around a dollar)
My problem this year has been the moths in the pantry. I found some really great traps for them at Piedimontes in Fitzroy which seem to work OK, but there are still scads of the buggers flapping around at night. But at least the pantry seems free of them now.
wow. those jars must really not seal well.
i’ve tried the cloves thing because i was told something similar & the ants i tried it on couldn’t have cared less. :-\
an old grandma’s solution for ants is to put cloves in the cupboard. ants just hate the small of cloves, and don’t get near.
The tally so far; 2 for and 1 against the use of cloves.
Perhaps it is species specific. Worth a go…cheap & non-chemical.
Nahhh – go fipronil – works a treat. Use it on all the ant nests around the house for a couple of years in a row and you won’t see them at all the third year. I do feel a bit guilty about killing the wee beggars – but they are a big nuisance – and most of the Aussie ones bite too!
definitely worth a try on the cloves. like wish-ga said, they’re so cheap & you can use them in cooking as well.
I work in a science department of a Melbourne university and we had an ant problem in a laboratory. The ant had actually got into one of the freezers (normal, domestic upright freezer with drawer compartments) – must have had a dodgy seal. At any rate, it was a short-lived problem, as ants don’t tend to cope with subzero temperatures. I found it amazing that over a hundred ants followed their nest mates like lemmings to their certain death…