Best Way to Kill an Ant Colony

[Music] [Applause] [Music] we've established that for the most part they're beneficial and they are basically like a pre-worm shredder of decomposing plant material but let's say you've got a problem and you want to deal with it can we talk but let's first talk about what people say on the internet when you go on a facebook group or whatever and say or you just talk to people at work you say i got an ant problem what do i do in my garden not in the house right we're talking about the garden i got an ant problem in my garden what do i do how do i sort these things out right well recently that question came up on one of the facebook groups it wasn't my group but it was a general gardening group and within a few days we had 15 to 20 solutions for getting rid of your ants the sad part is almost none of those work you're never going out of business robert with the gardening myths 20 blogs on how to not to get rid of ants if i wanted to but i put it together all in one blog post so there are a couple things you can do uh diatomaceous earth will harm plants and the best thing to do is to put it right in the opening right where the nest is because diatomaceous earth has to get on the skin of the and and it actually dries out the skin right so the ants will take it into the nest just because it's on their body and other ants in the nest will get it and it will kill some ants it's very unlikely that diatomaceous earth will get rid of a colony right uh you'll get rid of a lot of ants but the thing to remember about ants is that the queen is deep down in the nest and if you don't kill the queen you haven't killed the colony if things get really bad in a nest like you disturb it you you stir the soil around and bother them or you trickle water into their nest continually they will simply move and the queen will be gathered up with a bunch of ants and they'll just go and make a new nest somewhere else you're not killing them and they usually don't go very far so you may not see them and they're no longer under that particular plant but they are somewhere else in the in the garden right you know so you have to kill that queen if you want to kill the colony you said it at the beginning of the section that diatomaceous earth damages the plant i think you meant ants the diatomaceous earth harms the ants yeah not not the plant not the plant now you the if you go and buy commercial products to get rid of ants a lot of that material has borax in it right and so you can take borax and mix it with anything sweet so some people mix it with honey some people mix it with just sugar some people dissolve it up into a liquid all of those should work so borax is very toxic to the ants borax is also toxic to plants though okay so you have to you don't want to spread that around your garden in any large amounts so what you want to do is put it into a little dish or some little container where the ants will come and get it and they'll take it back to their colony but you don't really want to spread it around on the soil and you i mean a little bit's okay but too much borax will kill plants it's very toxic to plant roots and you mix it in with something because the ants won't really go for the borax unless it's on something that they like yeah apparently they can't taste the borax so they think they're collecting sugar right they come along they find this sweet stuff they'll eat it they'll take some back they'll feed it to their their the young in the nest and through that process you kill the one the other ants in the nest so the borax is poisonous and the honey and the sugar is the treat that gets them to pick it up right and that that will work and that's probably the best solution for a homeowner to use right borax is very easy to get you'll find it in the laundry section of most grocery stores it's relatively inexpensive and as long you don't eat it it's very safe right so you can mix it in with some water and sugar you could put it in a coffee grinder with some sugar you could do things like that you don't even have to grind it up you can just take white sugar the borax is also a white powder and just mix it together about 50 50. 50 50. right yeah now there are recipes online that are more complicated and some people boil it and they do a bunch of other things but the simplest recipe is just white sugar some borax mix it up and put it somewhere where the ants will find it right and they're going to bring that back to the larvae to the queen they'll take it into the colony to feed other ants that are in the colony right so the worker ants are out getting food and they bring it back for the other ants that are in the colony i see and particularly the the ant nymphs or whatever they're called uh they feed those while they're very young in the colony i see and they'll feed it to the queen as well i see okay yes i like the sound of this okay so this is if they i mean yes we don't want to bother them if they're not a problem but if you've got a real problem this is a pretty serious pretty good solution i guess um so that that would be your number one recommendation for dealing with an ant problem if you have a real ant problem not just not if you hate ants maybe you should get over it but if you've got an ant problem that's really causing problems with your garden that's a good way to deal with it [Music] you

Channel: Maritime Gardening

Views: 144,470

Keywords: ants, colony, borax, pests, gardening

Id: bEQ2hcLQ0Kk

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020