Home Improvement: My War With Ants

I am having an epic battle with ants and they are winning. Last year I had carpenter ants in the spring and sugar ants in the fall. I got some traps which did nothing. After researching on the net, I found a recipe for homemade bait using boric acid, sugar and water. That seemed to do the trick.

This spring, the carpenter ants came back. I mixed up a fresh batch of bait which did the trick again. There was only one problem. Apparently, the carpenter ants were a food source for thief ants. Now that they were hungry, they came into the house looking for food. The bait had no effect on them because they are "fat" ants. Fortunately, they seemed to find some other outside food source so that problem solved itself.

At the same time, I was facing an attack on a second front. While I fought back the advancing hordes coming through my bedroom window, a division of sugar ants began flanked me and started attacking from the rear. In other words, they were coming in through my front door threshold.

These little nuisances were particularly hard to fight. I mixed up some more bait, but they had an abundance of crumbs to choose from. Continuing the war analogy, I suffered countless friendly fire incidents from my kids. Whether it was the bait or the weather or something else, they eventually went away.

Now it is fall again and I have sugar ants again. This time, they decided to launch an attack on my supply lines (aka, my kitchen). They found a way through the weather stripping. Since winter is coming and the weather stripping needed to be replaced anyway, I have been working on that. So far, I replaced both the back and front door jam weather stripping. I added some foam stripping to the windows. Finally, I replaced the door sweep on the back door, since that was the point of entry. I have faith that I will win this war. I have another sweep, which is good because my wife just told me she encountered an advanced scout trying to infiltrate my communication network (the mail/front door). If all else fails, I might have to initiate a troop surge (outdoor bait/poison).