…Taming Sugar Ants (aka Little Black Rovers)

. . . Taming Sugar Ants (aka Little Black Rovers)

We’ve all seen these annoying bugs.  There are teeny, tiny black ants that are in many homes.  They come in when it is very wet outside.  They come in when they find food inside (even though they don’t seem to take any).  Over the past year or so, I have learned too much about these pests.

For us, they first appeared in our youngest child’s bedroom.  There was a cry of, “MOM!!  There are ants all over my room!”  WHAT?!?!?!?!?!  They weren’t exactly ALL over the room; their march started at the window, went up the wall, behind the trim, down the wall, across the floor, and into the corner.  I called the exterminator. 

When the exterminator arrived, he said that ant bait traps work and to put them around.  He also said that we should caulk around the window since that was how they were getting in.  He put a little poison down for them.  He said that he’d have someone come back with a special treatment for the perimeter of the house which should take care of them.  It did . . . for a while.

Periodically we’d have had a scout ant or two, but we “took care of” them before they could report back to the others.  Until a few weeks ago.  I had done a major deep cleaning of the kid’s bedroom and found a few.  No big deal.  I killed them and moved on.

The next day there were a few more and so on for about a week.  They eventually made a trail to the kitchen.  Um, NO!!!!  Not in MY kitchen!!  I killed them all, all day long.  The next morning when I got up, I checked and there were fewer on the trail to the kitchen.  I then looked in the empty sink and saw hundreds!  EW!  I used my name-brand, safe for kids and pets bug spray and that killed them instantly (and the scent is enjoyable – essential oils).  We read up on the ants and learned that if you use a spray cleaner with ammonia in it, it removed the pheromone trail that the scout ants produce to lead other ants to the food.  It worked.  I saw a few the next week or so but they would not cross the line where I had wiped the floor with the spray cleaner.  I called the exterminator who said that they need to see them to treat them and to call back come back but do not kill them.  They would send someone out ASAP.

I went on vacation for a week and was a nervous wreck about what I was going to come home to.  You guessed it – a much smaller, but still existent, line of ants.  This time they started somewhere in the kid’s room and had a line to the kitchen.  They did not go on the counter or in the sink but they were going under the counter overhang behind the kitchen sink area.  I called the exterminator.  They sent the same guy out.  He remembered us (I don’t think that was a good thing).

He put the bait/poison all in nooks and crannies wherever he saw ants (that was a lot of places).  He saw a bunch on the floor and, since there is a gap between 2 of the wood boards along their path, he put some in there.  He was very excited to be able to sit on the floor and watch all the ants converge on the poison.  They were like little Borg ants – they were of one mind (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation).  We put a chair over it so no one would step in it and ants continued to go there, taste it, and die.  I figured we would clean up all the dead ants in the morning and, believe me, there were a lot of them when we went to bed.

When I walked into the living room in the morning, there were NO ants anywhere.  Even the dead ones were gone.  I guess that ants are cannibals too.  Nothing goes to waste.

I have learned too much about these pests.  I hope that I don’t have to deal with them again but I won’t hold my breath.  I hope that sharing this helps others.  And I hope that I never see those tiny things again. LOL