I need to ask some of you out there for a bit of advice. Perhaps you or someone you know have had a similar experience and maybe, just maybe, your nuggets of knowledge and words of wisdom will provide me with the solution to the problem. So here goes:
A few weeks ago, I noticed a few ants leisurely strolling across the windowsill of my bathroom. I removed them and thought nothing of it until I returned later on that day to see that there were more ants on the same sill and on the wall near it.
Remembering that I dealt with this same problem about 6 months earlier, I retrieved from my garage an unused box of ant poison. The way this stuff works is that the ants will eat/drink/whatever this poison and drag it back to their colony and it will poison the lot of them. Allegedly (from what I read on the box), this stuff is not toxic to humans (provided we don’t consume it like halloween candy), so I snipped the ends of the plastic container with scissors and I set down two traps.
The next day I returned, hoping to see no ants, but I saw the near-opposite. There were about 50 or so ants snacking on the stuff (the package is clear so you can see in; it reminds me of animals drinking from a watering hole in the jungle). Some of them appeared to be dead but in retrospect they were just resting because when I returned again later I found that the poison watering hole had all but been abandoned.
Yea, the plan worked.
No, not really.
Two days of no activity later, when I awoke at my usual 5 am on a weekday, and I noticed that now there were like 300 ants frantically gathering around the watering hole. This time, a bunch of them were just laying around and not moving (very un-antlike) and others were climbing over them to get to the nectar. When I returned yet again later on in the day, the hole was abandoned except for the few that had managed to drown themselves in the intoxicating pool of alleged ant-death liquid.
Hoping that perhaps today was the day that no ants would be there when I awoke, I discovered this morning around five am that there were still about 3 or 4 dozen ants imbibing the bittersweet juice.
My question is this: Am I using the right stuff? Is this liquid only temporarily killing them or is it just knocking them out for a few days? Should I try other brands? Do I have to call an exterminator? It’s starting to rain outside these days and I vaguely recall ants seeking shelter when it rains.
Give me a shout out here and drop some knowledge on me. I am tired of having the ants for breakfast every other day.
