Last Updated on June 14, 2020 by Kimberly Crawford
Summer is full of fun and sun and oh, of sugar ants too. Generally, ants are part of the balance of nature specifically in cleaning around.
We all know that the life of ants is divided between the rainy season when they are in their nests and out and about during the dry season as they scour for food. As such, you will find them in a file in humid spaces in the home and mostly in the kitchen and dining table where the food is. During these times, sugar ants could be pesky, thus, leading you to the question, how do I get rid of sugar ants?
What are sugar ants?
Sugar ants are those tiny red ants or winged black ants with a unique coconut like smell when they crawl up and down those kitchen walls.
They are known to be notorious around sweet food and substances like fruits, rice, sugar itself and juices, among others. They thrive wherever it is humid. Rumors have it that once they infest your home, it will be hard to get rid of them.
Why are sugar ants infesting my home and why should I get rid of them?
Normally, sugar ants are contentedly swarming outside the home especially if you have fruit-bearing trees around or enough flowers to get nectar from. But as they grow in number, the outdoor food could only supply so much and finding a stable food source inside the home could be a real deal sealer for them. You will usually locate them in your pantry, kitchen and of course in their dirt hills found in wood fixtures or in the soil or garden.
Aside from the occasional itchy to painful bites, they could be a nuisance inside the home when they start gnawing on your cupboards and even plastic containers. Aside from this, their presence inside the house attracts ant predators like spiders and centipedes.
How do I get rid of sugar ants permanently?
You would be surprised to know that most of the ways you could exhaust to get rid of sugar ants permanently are just within arms’ reach. Since there are a lot of them, we will just summarize them all into four types.
1. Coffee and condiments
Sugar ants are drawn to sweet foods so for sure, there are food variants that will also compel them to leave your house permanently.
For starters, you can always pour ground coffee in possible entry points like in window sills and other entryways. While coffee is a potent anti sugar ant substance, it stains. Thus, alternatives for coffee would include bay leaves, pepper and even cucumber peels.
Leaving these around the spots where they could niche overpowers the sweet scent they are following.
2. Powdered home remedies
By powdered home remedies for sugar ants we do not mean chemicals. In this roster, we have cornstarch and borax (which is an ingredient in many household powder cleaners).
The potent thing about these powdered home remedies is that they do not take effect immediately but they sure are fatal.
For one, it will take a few minutes or so before sugar ants die out of ingesting the substance. And this is good because most of them will make it to their dirt hills, carrying the killer powder with them hence, also the other sugar ants in their nests.
3. DIY cleaners
As with the powdered home remedies, you can also make homemade cleaners that are just as potent.
First, you could always have the soap and water 50-50 solution which is a proven insect killer.
Second, you could also spray vinegar in the ant trails or directly in their dirt hills. The pungent and strong odor of the vinegar is also as potent as the soap and water solution. For the vinegar intervention, you have to follow a 70-30 solution.
4. Ant killer sprays
If worse comes to worst, there are always available ant killer sprays in the market (and online).
Of course, some of the aforementioned home remedies come with a glitch sometimes and if you want to make sure that the sugar ant problem does not come by again, a concentrated solution made just for the prime reason to keep those sugar ants away from our homes is of course a convenient solution.
Conclusion
To conclude, just because ants look all too harmless and friendly would not mean that they could not be considered pests in the long run.
Aside from their stinging bite (which by the way could be fatal for people with sting allergies), they invite other pests to invade your home. The good news is that there are a lot of available home remedies for you to get rid of them permanently without a sweat.