There are ants EVERYWHERE!!!

[hawke3000]

There are ants everywhere in my house!!I hate using pesticide but I need to get rid of them!!!What should I do???:bawl:

[juna]

Move.. ^_~

Erm, odd question, do you keep a clean house? I notice when I keep my dishes laying around sometimes I tend to gather more of ants then when it's clean.

If there are a lot of them, you may have a serious problem that you should call a pest control tech for.

Good luck. ^_^

[Guest Chris]

[color=green][size=1]hmm . . . . maybe you should call an exterminater? or you could stomp on them one by one. maybe you should move. i sugest the exterminater thing.[/size][/color]

[Guest Randleman]

stop leaving sweat/ant attracting stuff around. and squish them with your thumb.

[Sara]

[size=1]We used to have an ant problem at our old house...this is when I was five or six, right after we moved in. Dad spent about a year sprinkling ant crystals all around the outside of the house and in the basement. The problem went away and never came back.

Now, though, we're in a new house, and we have the problem all over again. *laughs*[/size]

[BabyGirl]

[color=deeppink]In some parts of the country there's just nothing you can do.

The city in California that I live in has a huge ant problem, so whenever it rains the ants come inside and attack anything from candy to alcohol to makeup products.

They pretty much take over the houses around there, and there's nothing you can really do except to be careful what you leave lying around. It may also help to put ant traps around the places that you find them most frequently, and RAID really is a good quick fix/last resort.

Good luck, I know what a pain they can be![/color]

[Guest Edward-Chan]

Or you can slowly torture them to death by using tweezers, the classic magnifing glass, or any sharp object. muhahahahaha

But ya know pesticides can work too.:D

[GreenEyedDragon]

[color=red]you can feed them dry oatmeal, because the moisture inside them will make the oatmeal expand and they'll explode....but see then you would just have DEAD ants everywhere, so maybe an exterminator would work better...[/color]

[Juu]

[color=ff00cc] [size=1]After just two hot days, we're having the same problem. ...Only, with mosquitoes. >>;

There used to be like, no mosquitoes in San Fran, but now I see them everywhere. And we only had two days at 87 degrees. But, no ants here. There are ants near my friends' house, but that's where I'm moving this August. Luckily, no fireants though.

I remember when I used to live in Texas, though. We had ants [i]everywhere[/i], and they just loved biting me. - .-;

Whenever we had lots of ants coming in, we'd just follow them along the wall, and find what parts they were coming from. Then, we'd just spray Raid in that area. Usually, Raid keeps bugs from going to that area for one-two days...[/color] [/size]

[XeEmO]

My cousin's had a similar problem and I think they still do. I remember pouring myself a big bowel of cereal and seeing ants in it. My aunt told me to just pick the ants out. You could always just get used to it like they did. Ahhh, memories...

Edit: Oh wait, that wasn't helpful. If you leave dishes everywhere that's definatly a no-no if you don't want ants. So when you find a way to get rid of them just don't leave your dishes out. For if you do, they just might return.

[Mei]

[color=green]We had this exact same problem less than a month ago. There were ants absolutely EVERYWHERE. They were on the floor, tables, counters, and one night I couldn't sleep in my own room because they had invested my desk and bed! The usual reason is...leaving food or dirty dishes around, like Juna said.

Keep your house clean, and NEVER leave a dirty dish or glass around anywhere but your nice, wet sink. We've done this, and I haven't seen an ant in this house for quite a long time.^~(though I can't say the same about mosquitos.)

Another thing we did was put these little "Ant Houses" around the kitchen. They were cheap, and seemed to work fairly well, much cheaper then an exterminator.^^() I suggest you buy some, and place them about your house in safe places where pets or small children won't find them. I wouldn't buy these until you've tried the dishes thing first.

If all advice in this thread fails, then call an exterminator or specialist who can really deal with this problem. That's all the advice I've got for you, thankyou.^^[/color]

[BlackDragon465]

*sees room looks like a pile of crap*

I think I am going to tackle cleaning all my floor tomorrow after reading this thread. I am so freaking lazy so I hope I can accomplish it. I hate bugs for some reason. I am a guy and I get the creeps from them LOL!!:D

[Kinetic]

I agree with Juu there are a lot of ants in Texas, but luckily I don't have a problem here at my house. The fireants are bad, but I really don't know how to tell them apart. Some of my friends are tortured by the pests so much that they have red marks all over their legs from where they've been bit.

I really hate ants, and I sympathize for you, but I'm going to hop on the bandwagon and tell you to get ant traps or hire an exterminator (if you're not afraid of your pets [if you have any] health that is).

[future girl]

hahahahahah, if you're really cheap you can do what we did for our ant problem:

hairspray and clorox. there is not one ant in our house now:D

[SaiyanPrincessX]

In my old house we had a bad ant problem. Theywere the big ones too. It was nasty, you would find them all the time. Sometimes one would fall from the beams on the ceiling onto the dinning room table. There wasn't anything we could really do though because the house was back in the woods. From the top of our driveway, in the summer, you couldn't see the house; meaning we had alot of trees. Our house was crawling with bugs though, but I won't get into that. Now I see them once in awhile but we no longer live in a house backed into the woods so not as many. ^^

I suggest the exterminator or ant traps, as mentioned. Ants are pests that can get really annoying. ¬_¬

[terra]

my parents just had an attack from flying ants ... in the middle of the night. my dad got up and sprayed them all with pesticide and vacuumed them up, I think.

on the topic of bug infestation, we moved into a new house some five years ago, we were SWARMED by ladybugs the first fall. we had this very high ceiling and I swear it was practically covered with ladybugs, it was really disgusting. they were crawling on top of each other and stuff ... we used the vacuum system that was built in to the house and vacuumed all the ones we could reach. then we worried for the longest time that they might be alive in the garage, where the vacuum ended, and just breeding there. but they weren't.

... yep ... so ants, huh? the vacuum is key in getting rid of them, in my opinion. and, of course, the cleanliness that many others mentioned :-P.

[Solo Tremaine]

I don't think we've ever had huge problems with ants, but a few weeks ago there was a swarm of bees in my bedroom o_o; That was rather worrying. Thankfully, they were rather dopey and easy to catch so we put them out of the window.

If we do get ants (and it's usually only one or two at a time), we squish 'em. That way they can't get back to the nest to bring back more ants. Another thing to do is make sure any holes in the skirting board or floor are covered up/filled in. If there's no way to get in then they shouldn't bother you.

[Roxie Faye]

[color=#9933ff]Couple years ago my house had a problem with termites. O_o all the wood on the back deck was rotting anyways. We had to get an exterminator, and then someone to replace our deck.

The year before THAT we had these little insects crawling inside two of our kitchen cabinets. The two cabinets were, really, just one big cabinet on the wall, runnign the total length of it, but broken up by a slab of wood. Well, the top one was our pantry with rotting white flour and some other old stuff. And they creeped into the bottom cabinet. Illustrated by my beautiful diagram.

We finally got rid of them by sparying RAID or one of those other bug killers. Though, we did have to use a broom and pan to get out all the dead ones. >< And my mom threw away the flour.

Check for old food in your house. COULD BE...(either that or heat)[/color]

[Fall]

Is your house wooden? Like, does it have wooden boards on the outside, a wooden roof, or anything built for the house that's wooden? If it does, put a hole in a wall or something and check inside it. If there's ants inside it, your house is eaten out by termites. Can't do nothing about it, and within a few years your house is going to fall down, so move.

Dunno. Maybe that just happens here. Happens all the time here actually.

[Star I Am Not]

In my old bedroom in Singapore there's an ant nest in the attic right above it. There're tiny little holes everywhere in the ceiling that we can really do nothing about, so the ants come and go from there. Since I'm a complete pig concerning food, we've never gotten rid of the ants. We also have little grey-green lizards, but they don't do any harm and they're everywhere in Singapore, so they're not a problem.

Here in Canada, though... Summer heralds the coming of spiders. Lots of them. Big one, small ones, icky ones, ones that bite REALLY painfully (I'm not kidding; have you seen the SIZE of those fangs?! Scares the poopie out of me.) I keep finding cobwebs everywhere. There was one on my table lamp a few days ago, but I wrecked it and chased the spider away. But apparantly Mr Spider moved to my brother's table lamp. Stupid spiders. Though it is quite interesting to watch the web on the chandelier grow.