by Brett Jones
Have you had ant infestations? Have you bought ant baits only to find they do nothing? This is a common scenario. Many people I have spoken to about this situation eventually call in a pest management company who then spray around and inside your house with fipronil. This is not good.
Sometimes ant baits will work, and other times they appear to do nothing. There is a very good reason for this: ant baits sold in shops use mainly sugar as the bait. Some claim to use both sugar and protein, but the quantity of protein is small.
Australian ants are more likely to be “protein” ants than “sugar” ants. As this suggests, some ants prefer protein as their food source and some prefer sugar. Using a sugar bait will not work on protein ants—they will walk right past it.
The trick is to find a bait they like to eat first. It may be honey, Vegemite, or, very commonly, peanut butter. Once you find what they like, you have got them.
The safest “poison” to use is borax.
Borax (sodium tetraborate) kills insects primarily by acting as an internal digestive poison and a metabolic disruptor when ingested.
How It Works Inside the Insect
- Stomach Poison: When an insect eats borax, the mineral enters the digestive tract.
- Disrupted Systems: It attaches to the stomach lining, releasing toxic boron compounds that wreck the insect’s digestive and nervous systems.
- Dehydration and Starvation: The insect loses the ability to process food or absorb nutrients, leading to a slow death from internal poisoning and severe dehydration.
It also has another great property that allows extermination at the nest level, killing the queen:
- Slow-Acting Nature: In the right quantity Borax does not kill quickly. It gives foraging ants enough time to carry the tainted food back to their nests and share it with the queen and larvae before they die, wiping out the entire colony.
Using protein-based baits with borax targets the ant nest precisely. You are not killing wasps, spiders, or other beneficial insects, as spraying with fipronil does.
To get this to work, there are 3 important “ingredients”:
- Correct bait
- Correct quantity of borax
- Patience
The correct bait is discovered by trial and error. Put out a variety of possible bait foods all at once and see which one they choose.
The correct quantity of borax is between 1% and 5% by weight. This is enough to kill them, but slowly enough that they carry it home and share it around inside the nest. Over 5% will not kill the ants in the nest!
Patience is the key. We tried everything in our kitchen and nothing worked at first; we had two well-established nests to deal with. Once we worked out the correct bait, it still took several weeks of watching ants consume the bait until we finally saw a reduction in numbers. Now we can leave out anything we want and not one ant shows up. We exterminated them at the nest level.
We discovered the importance of the correct ratio in our bathroom, where they were nesting behind the shower tiles. In there, we found hundreds of dead ants every day, but they just kept coming. We were killing ants at an amazing rate, but they were dying before they could get back to the nest. The queen was simply replacing them.
Note from the editor: there are other brands than the one featured on this photo.