Natural Ways to Get Rid of Ants Inside & Outside Your Home

When the weather outside begins to warm up, ants can become a problem inside and outside your home. Although a swarm of ants outside in your garden or on your patio are less of a problem as they can be inside your home inside your pantry and on the kitchen floor, you will still want to get rid of them. Here are some tips to help you deal with the problem pests inside and out of your home.

Inside Your Home

Clean Up Food Spills

One of the first prevention methods you should take to keep your home free of swarming ants is to clean up your floor, countertops, and other surfaces in your home of any food spills and crumbs. This means you need to sweep the floor and wipe up any spots and spills of food as soon as possible.

The way ants work to search for food sources is they send out scouting ants to look for anything edible. As soon as they detect a food source, they send a message back to the ant colony for the rest of the ants to come and take the food back to the colony. Removing the food sources in your home prevents the swarming from occurring.

Diatomaceous Earth

Diatomaceous earth is the fossilized remains of aquatic microorganisms called phytoplankton, and has the appearance of a powder and is good for getting rid of ants in your home. It is safe for pets and humans, but make sure you use food grade diatomaceous earth for this purpose. 

Sprinkle the powdery material onto the areas in your home where ants are usually found to come from. As the ants walk over the diatomaceous earth, its sharp edges stick to their waxy exoskeleton and work their way into their joints and body, puncturing holes into them and killing them. Repeatedly sprinkle diatomaceous earth over common ant entry points in your home until you no longer see ants coming in.

Outside Your Home

Ant mounds and their swarming in your garden soil can be quite a nuisance and can disturb the soil around your garden plants, especially in larger ant mounds. It can be difficult to prevent outdoor ant swarms by using repellents to keep the ants away. Often, a single ant colony can have several queens, which keep the ant colony supplied with new workers. Argentine Ant colonies, which are found all over the United States are not competitive for territory and will combine their numbers with other colonies to create a super-colony within the soil of your yard.

You also may not want to use pesticides in your garden and around your produce. For this reason, you will need to use natural baits and other treatments to get rid of the ant colony and their many queens.

Borax Bait

Borax is a powder you can find at most grocery and home improvement stores and will kill ants in your yard. It is important to realize this substance is harmful to humans and animals, so keep it away from children and pets. But, by following this treatment to make a sticky and sweet bait for ants, you can kill off the ants swarming your garden or outside space and keep your children and pets safe.

First, combine three parts sugar to two parts Borax into a bowl, then add enough water to make the mixture the consistency of loose paste. You can also heat the past in a pot over heat on your stove to get the solution to combine better. Next, spoon the Borax solution into an empty soda or beer can. Place the can outside on the ground near your ant problem, upright so its contents stay safely inside the can. Place a plastic bucket or bin over the soda can to keep it safe from animals and children and keep water and rain from entering the can to dilute the mixture. 

The ants will immediately be attracted to the sweet, sticky substance inside the can and will swarm into it, taking the mixture back into their colony. As the ants eat the mixture, it will kill them off. Be patient while the solution works, as it can sometimes take several weeks to work, depending on the number of ants in the colony or super-colony.

Use these tips to help you get rid of ants inside and outside your home. For more assistance, contact services like American Pest Control Inc.


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