by Alexia Schulz

Created on: February 05, 2007   Last Updated: January 29, 2009

There it is again, you get up in the middle of the night and you find a little black river of Argentine ants trailing across your bathroom floor and into the trash can. Or maybe you're cooking dinner when you notice a two way flow of these critters going along the ceiling into your pantry. If you're very unlucky, when you investigate further you'll find they've invaded everything from Bisquick to cough drops. What can you do?

Fighting the ant wars is time consuming but thankfully not terribly difficult, and the good news is that once you clean up the first time, it' is fairly easy to maintain an ant-free zone. The process:

COLLECT MATERIALS

-Rag

-Ant Spray or heavy duty cleaner like Formula 409 (Best if it contains bleach or is heavily scented)

-Vacuum cleaner with a hose and nozzle attachment

-Plenty of Tupperware and Ziplock bags for food storage

-Airtight (or nearly airtight) trash containers

WAGE WAR WITH THE ANTS

1) Throw away all contaminated foods you're sure you would never eat.

2) Go thoroughly through each room in the house (especially the kitchen) and clean up any food that your kids may have left lying out and around (apple cores, orange peels, etc.). Pay particular attention to collecting crumbs, whcih to an ant are tasty snack-sized morsels. You will find a lot of crumbs under your toaster.

2) Empty your trash in the kitchen and bathrooms.

2) Get the vacuum out and use the little nozzle attachment to suck up the line of ants. Make a mental note of the hole they are coming out of (don't worry, if you forget you just have to wait 2 or 3 minutes before they pop back out).

3) Get some household ant spray, and spray it into the hole. I use RAID. Stick to the indoor variety and avoid outdoor insecticides. If you don't have RAID or another indoor spray, I've also used 409 which works almost as well.

4) Get a soapy rag and clean the place where the ant trail was, ants find their way by smelling the trail so the goal is to eliminate their roadmap. You can do this with the RAID or cleaning solution as well.

5) Look around and see if the ants have started creeping out a nearby hole (a common ant trick), vacuum them up, and spray the RAID in those holes as well.

MAINTAIN AN ANT FREE ZONE

The next trick is to keep your home ant free.

1) Get Ziplock bags or Tupperware for everything in the pantry, and keep all food and crumbs off the counters. If there's nothing to eat, the ants won't turn up.

2) It sounds gross, but ants will go for sanitary napkins too, so change the bathroom trash often. If possible swap your trash cans in the kitchen and bathroom out for ones that have odor-control lids.

3) Keep in mind ants come in when it rains, so be extra vigilant during inclement weather.

With just a little care, your home could be ant free (or at least ant poor) forevermore.

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