We have an infrequent, but still recurring ant problem: every few years or so, we find ants coming into our kitchen. Now is one of those times, and our go-to solution is to destroy the colony using homemade ant bait — a cotton ball soaked in sugar water (which also contains borax) brings them swarming, they bring the sugar water back to the hive and feed everyone else, and the borax kills them all over a few days. I currently have a cotton ball near their entrance point, and it is literally covered in ants…
Anyway, when I went to set the bait I found that our previous batch was almost all gone. I couldn’t remember the exact proportions for the recipe so I had to do some Googling, and then I prorated what I found to fit in our container. For my readers, and for my own future self, here is the recipe:
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 tablespoon borax (we have this for our DIY laundry soap)
- enough water to make 1 cup of the mixture
Mix the borax and sugar into the water until it dissolves, then put it in a container and toss in some cotton balls to soak. That’s it!
I put one cotton ball on the kitchen counter, and one at whatever entry point I can find, and change them every day or so when they dry out. This is a bit harder to do right now, because it takes as long as a week to wipe out the hive, but we can’t leave the bait out when we have Iris over. Still, it seems to be working; the ants are not in the kitchen anymore and I’m sure we’re almost done.
