Elf Sternberg

A friend of mine called me this afternoon to ask me about how to deal with black sugar ants in his home. I game him the run-down, but in case I wasn't clear, here are the products and techniques I use.

First, understand the ant. It's not an organism in its own right, any more than your pancreas is. Most ants can't even eat: they hatch with a glucose reserve that runs down, at which point its nest-mates tear it apart and use its body for construction material. Only the queen eats.

The ant you encounter in your hame is typically a scout, programmed by evolution to wander around in a fashion that takes it farther from the nest until it finds food, at which point it follows the trail its laid back home.

At which point, a whole bunch of ants recognize the food and follow the trail back. As they do, they take micrometer shortcuts until the angles and turns are straightened out and you have a river of ants.

Your job is to stem the river, convince the ants not to come through the opening they exploited and, ultimately, to kill the queen. There are three steps I recommend for this.

Stem the river: Tea Tree oil and a q-tip. Ants can't stand this stuff, so it's useful to create a cordon around whatever crack or crevice they're using to get into the house.

Ants are resourceful, so at best this is a stop-gap measure. It might also be useful to have a great ant whirlwind: a vacuum-cleaner to suck up the ant trail, following it back to the source, while your partner in mass murder follows behind with a soapy sponge to destroy the chemical trail.

Convince them not to come through: Diatomaceous Earth and a rubber squeeze bulb, like the kind sold in drugstores for irrigation purposes (usually sold in the ear/nose section). Diatomacous earth is basically sand so finely ground it's dangerously dusty. For us humans, it will dry your skin out in seconds, but it's otherwise relatively safe.

Because it's basically ground glass. At that tiny scale, it's irritating to our tissues. Obviously, don't breathe it or get it into your eyes. But to an ant, it's like that scene in Die Hard where McClane has to run across broken glass, and no ant is Bruce F'ing Willis.

Use the squeeze bulb and inject this stuff into the walls and other interstices where ants are coming through, and that'll put the kibosh on them for some time.

Kill the Queen: No one's quite sure why ants haven't evolved the capacity to recognize borax, given how simple it is, but so far it remains an effective technique for poisoning the queen ant. The trick is to convince her drones to bring it to her.

For that, you use sugar. You're going to have to put up with them coming into your home for a day or two, but if they're someplace hidden, along the baseboard, you can corral them with the tea tree oil and send them to the bait. You mix it 1:1 or 1:2 borax to sugar. If you've got protein-hungry ants, you can use peanut butter, although fat-hungry ants seem to go best for cheap, mushy cat-food. Mix in the borax with whatever you've chosen (you might try all three, and see which ones the ants go for), and put it in the path of the ants. They'll find that and stop seeking whatever else they were after, then take the bait back to the queen. You wait about 48 hours, and the trail will eventually die away, and then after 96 hours they'll be completely gone.

And that's about it. Obviously, keep your kitchen clean, keep as much food as possible in sealed containers, and keep your eyes open. Discourage them where you can, kill them when necessary, and if they're persistent, a clean like of caulk will often keep them at bay for quite a while.