Ants will invade your home for many reasons – they could be looking for food or water, or if there is rotting wood in your home, the ants may use it for habitat.
Late spring and summer are the most common times these pests enter a home because that’s when they’re most active.
Whether you’re dealing with ants indoors or out, it’s best to eliminate the ant nest versus simply repelling ants.
Each ant colony can contain hundreds or thousands of members. Left alone, ant colonies multiply, and a small problem can become a nightmare pretty quickly.
Having found a solution that works for him to “eliminate” ants in homes and gardens, Stuart Warsop took to the Mrs Hinch Gardening Tips Facebook page to share his “homemade ant killer” recipe.
He said: “Do you have an ant problem, inside or out? This will get rid of them for good.
“What’s so cool about this is, it took them two minutes to find it and five minutes to fill up.”
For this recipe household will need one empty water bottle, (cut down to about two inches tall), five tablespoons of baking soda, five tablespoons of icing sugar and three tablespoons of water.
Stuart continued: “The very best way of eliminating ants is truly simple. Take a small amount of powdered sugar (also called icing sugar) and mix it with an equal amount of baking soda (formally called sodium bicarbonate) and water.”
Icing sugar is “essential” as Stuart claimed that “you cannot use the larger grains of sugar for this”.
Mix the two powders together and then place small amounts against the walls or other areas where you would not normally walk but where you would normally see the ants.
Explaining how this works, Stuart said: “The ants will be attracted to the sugar and will eat some of it and collect more to take home to feed others, so all of them will get their share.
“The sugar and baking soda powders are similar in size and, once mixed together, the ants cannot separate the two items, so, as they eat the sugar, they will also ingest the baking soda, which they would otherwise never touch. This is the reason for using powdered sugar.
“Once the ants eat the baking soda it will react with the formic acid in their stomachs and cause gas.
“The bodies of ants are unlike humans and they cannot eliminate gas so it will build up inside and eliminate them for good.”
Experts at HGTV also recommended using this baking soda method. They said: “When ants nibble baking soda, it reacts with an acidic material in their stomachs and kills them. This bait can help kill ants in the nest too.”
