Effective Ant Control for Cheap

How Ant Poison Works

Ant Control: Liquid Ant Poison (left) and Plastic Ant Bait Station (right)
Image Source: Dr. Penny Pincher

Last year we had some small ants in the kitchen.  I put out a few plastic bait traps that I got at the grocery store for about $5, and the ants were gone after a few days and I didn't see any ants for a whole year.  You might wonder why I would pay $5 for some fancy ant bait traps when I could simply smash the ants for free.

Killing individual ants doesn't really solve the problem.  More ants will come to take the place of the ants you kill.  The same thing happens when you spray ants with bug spray.  It may kill a few, but the ant colony continues to produce more and more ants, and eventually some of those ants find their way to you.

You can use bug spray to make a perimeter, spraying it around your house to make a barrier to keep bugs out.  I have had some success with this, but ant trails can go places that are difficult to spray.  Plus the spray barrier breaks down after a few months and ants will start coming in again.

The best way to control ants is to take out the entire colony with a poison bait.  Ant bait stations use this approach, typically containing bait in granular form inside the plastic housing.  Worker ants take the poison bait back to the colony where it is fed to the larva and takes out the next generation of ants.

One of the nice things about using bait to take out ants is that you don't need to find the colony or even know where the ants are coming in.  The ants do the work of finding your poison bait and taking it back to the colony.

I don't like the idea of killing ants- I think they are neat little animals that have a social order and work very hard.  But I can't let ants take over my kitchen.

My Ant Problem This Year

This year, the little kitchen ants were back.  I put out some new plastic bait traps but they weren't working.  My wife noticed that the ants seemed to be ignoring the ant traps, walking right around them without bothering to climb up and explore them to find the bait inside.

The plastic ant traps are designed look decorative and have a flower pattern stamped into them.  It is nice that they try to make the ant traps look fancy, but it is still pretty obvious that they are ant traps.

Plastic Ant Bait Station
Image Source: Dr. Penny Pincher

I decided to go with an even cheaper ant control solution- Terro.  This is a sticky liquid bait, sort of the consistency of honey that you put on small pieces of cardboard for the ants to find.  I bought a small bottle of Terro for about $2.59.

Terro Liquid Ant Bait
Image Source: Dr. Penny Pincher

Ants Eating Liquid Ant Poison
Image Source: Dr. Penny Pincher

The little ants really like the Terro!  Within a couple hours, there were at least a dozen ants lined up around the drop of poison sucking it up- in the photo above, the ants are eating the bait on the card like crazy.  The worker ants take the poison back to the ant colony, where it starts acting and kills the entire colony.

As I said, don't like the idea of killing ants, but I can't really put up with ants in my kitchen.  Within a few hours of putting out the Terro bait, there are very few ants still wandering around.  I'll leave the bait out for at least a few days to make sure my ant problem is solved for this year.

It looks like I'm going to get away with not calling an exterminator, which would cost WAY more than $2.59.

Penny Pincher Journal

Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Penny Pincher.  All Rights Reserved.  Privacy Policy