I came home today to find my bedroom infested with ANTS!

Have you been eating in bed or dribbling crumbs around the room. Ants can sniff out a small bread crumb from 20 yards away?

You do need to find out how they are entering the house. And you could do a serious vacuuming every hour day.

Buy some of those little ant traps they sell in the store (there’s usually four in a pack). Put these in various locations around your room/house, and they should do the trick…

My mom taught me to mix sugar and borax and leave it around for them. They come for the sugar, but its mixed with borax so they bring both back to the nest and the borax poisons them. Its also relatively harmless to the environment (it breaks down really easily).

Basic store bought traps work too.

I have had really good luck with Grant’s Ant Stakes. Any supermarket should have them.

Pour some honey in a saucer and set it anywhere you want the ants to go. Works with soda and sliced fruit too.

Terro has worked best for me. It’s basically borax and corn syrup, but works best out of probably a half dozen things I’ve tried.

It may be that you are in for some rain too. Ants seem to head inside when rain is on the way. We have a product here called Ant Rid that seems to work okay. You put a drop of it in their path and they take it back to their next. I think @tedd‘s borax and sugar mix would work well too. Good luck with them!

I’m turning out the lights so I don’t have to watch them. Squished a lot of them, pretty much all I can do tonight. At least they won’t eat me alive… I think.

I get a box of little green vials at the asian grocery store. The name is in Korean I think and I can’t repeat it. It looks like brown sugar and works as some others have said above, you just sprinkle a few crumbs in their path, they take it back to their mates and it supposedly kills the entire colony. Where I live they will take over your entire life if you don’t keep them in check so I use the stuff everywhere. It is supposed to be safe if your pets ingest it. If there is an asian grocery near you, stop in and ask, I’ll bet they have it.

OK, this might sound dumb, but it helped me take out an entire ant colony once (including the queen). It was incredible.

First, figure out roughly where the ants are likely to congregate. This will be your ‘target area.”
Second, take a piece of fresh uncooked chicken about the size of your thumb. Lay it in your “target area.”
Third, wait for the ants to arrive at the piece of chicken.
Fourth, when there are lots of ants at the piece of chicken, take a wet towel and just wipe them all up.

Done.

Poor ants! They can be so helpful yet so pestilent. In the end, if they infringe on me, I take the bastards out by finding where they come in and block their escape…then destroy the supply line in evil ways.

I’ve had some success by putting ground cloves around & in cracks where they get in. Diatomaceous earth might be a good choice, too.

In FL the insect guy always laid down stuff that the ants walk through and then bring back to the nest to kill off all of them. However, I found it effective to use those pestcide bombs every so often. Just be sure not to use them with any gas lines open, or pilot lights on.

Also, maybe you can put some sort of stripping along the window so they cannot get in.

Make sure you don’t leave any food in your room. Ants are generally attracted to sugar, although some are attracted to fats/oils.

I second the ant baits. We tend to get little black ants in the living room and kitchen about once a year so I buy a couple of packs of bait. It doesn’t take long until we don’t have ants anymore. Although I’m pretty sure if we didn’t have kids, we wouldn’t have ants.

@tedd That’s what I do also. It works great and is inexpensive. I put it on a lid in a corner so that I don’t trip on it, but still near where the ants are everywhere. Every year we have this problem during the spring. How these anta manage to climb three stories, I don’t know! But we’ve gotten used to it. Plus, I like ants :). They don’t do too much harm.

@JLeslie I agree, but you can intentionally leave sugar, etc. as bait.

I would advise against using poisons, especially if you have pets.

@weeveeship Yeah poisoned sugar. Still not good for pets.

Okay, here’s the scoop and I’ll also tell you why it works. Use regular baking soda.. Won’t hurt you, won’t hurt scruffy and prissy, won’t hurt the environment. Sprinkle where ever they travel (no need to sprinkle on your bed if you don’t want to, just clean that up yourself because once you do that then they won’t return).. Pour it on them, around them and through them.. Keep the trails sprinkled as well as new ones (outside too). Before long you’ll be rid of them and can go back to your real life. What the baking soda does is cling to their bodies and their feet, it has no odor so they don’t feel threatened.. They clean themselves then eventually implode (it can take them all if they get it on them).. Why do they implode? Ants have no asshole so the gas that develops when baking soda meets water (saliva) well, it’s got to go somewhere and as ants also do not belch.. Learned this from my late, great grandma.. It’s worked every time I’ve tried it.. What have you got to loose?

I remember my first encounter killing ants there were hundreds of them on me, I woke up in the middle of the night, they were all over my body biting me and I was waking up, I ran to the bathroom and washed them all down the drain. Then the ants eating my pet gerbil, and mice, I took them and the gerbil outside and I lit them on fire, later I built a sort of geological thing, I thought I built it but people told me I couldn’t have built it, sort of weird, maybe it was Annatar.