No, not in our house!

For all the throw back Sonics fans, I had to yell "No, not in our house" and do a little dance to celebrate.  Feel free to celebrate with me because I killed them!

I did it!


Are you dancing a bit??  Remembering Gary "The golve" Payton sinking a 3?  No?  Just me then?

Oh my goodness I feel so proud of myself!!!!!!!

I speaking about the ant invaders who recently took over my kitchen and dining room.  I like to call them Mut-ants (get it??).
No, not in our house!
 As you know, nothing worked.  They even loved to eat the Raid traps!  They were multiplying.  They were Mut-ants who grew stronger by eating poison- only at my house.

I read every website and informational packet known to man and tried every home-remedy that was "for sure" to kill these little guys.  Yeah, well my Mut-ants didn't die, they were laughing at me. 

So I went back to the websites and thought maybe I missed something.

I read one website that touted to have the trick.  When I opened it, there was only one page, it said:

Find the queen and kill her.

Great advice, thanks.

Then I found an equally great site that told me how to find the queen:

Follow the trail of ants to the Queen.

These websites just keep getting more and more helpful.

Then I found the most helpful website EVER.  They explained that Borax was something that ants try to avoid and that is poisonous if ingested for ants.  I nearly clicked off this website, because I had already tried pouring some borax on my windowsill to prevent them from "crossing it."  It worked almost as well on my Mut-ants as cinnamon, Cayenne pepper and chalk (cue eye rolling).

PS. I have to shout out to the previous owners- Thank You!  (I know, you never thought I would say that) Thank you for leaving all the random cleaning products, gardening products etc in our basement. 

They left us tons of Mrs. Meyers cleaning stuff (which I have gladly used), and coincidentally they left a box of Borax (hello, I would never have thought to buy borax and use it in my laundry, or to kill mutant ants).  But since they had a whole box of Borax just waiting for me to annihilate ants with, I have to thank them.  They saved me from running to the store (again) and they deserve some of the credit for finally ousting my Mut-ants.  Just for that, I will refrain from sending them the radiator in the mail (that is if I could lift it from our front yard).

OK, now to the good stuff.

Ants are stupid.  This is a key component.

Ants will eat anything that tastes good, not bothering to check if there is poison in it.  My Mut-ants usually will eat poison, like it, grow stronger and multiply.  Not this time.

My smart online website friend told me to make a syrup/borax mixture and them let the ants eat their fill until their insides literally explode. (I couldn't wait)

So being pretty much willing to do anything, I mixed up a nice batter of borax/syrup (I used real maple syurp, not sure if it makes any difference).  Then I drizzled it on my windowsills and the top of our counter back splash (the Mut-ants favorite spots). 

When I woke up in the morning (after my poisonous drizzling), I realized 2 things. 
1- This is working!  There were dead ants stuck in the mixture (although I didn't notice any exploded insides).  They clearly loved my mixture so much that they ate until they died in the midst of eating.
2- My mixture was hard as a rock.  I worried that this would prevent the ants from getting the poison, but apparently it just made them work harder.  There were tons of ants chipping away at the hard "candy."  What I didn't realize that this "candy" would be almost impossible to clean up and get off my windowsill and counters (seriously a pain, but so worth it to kill all the Mut-ants).

By time I got home from work that day, there were no more moving ants.  There were dead ant carcasses, but no live ones.  (I know this sounds totally gross, but dead ant bodies are a walk in the park compared to live ones crawling on your food).

So I left it for 4 days to make sure we got all the ants to come eat the mixture and take it back to their hill and queen.  Yep, I killed the queen!  Take that stupid websites- I'm smarter than you (or at least smarter than the Mut-ants)!!  I didn't even have to follow the ants back to their hill and kill the queen with  my own 2 hands.  

My ant killing as evolved.

There are ants in my dining room as well, so this time, I mixed up a small batch of my poison and placed it in a small bowl on the windowsill.  Worked like a charm and now I don't have any clean up besides rinsing the bowl.  Genius!  These Mut-ants are making me smarter!

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