Sugar ants, otherwise known as pharaoh ants, are small, light brown, or tan ants. And as their name implies, they love sugar, honey, jelly, breads, and greasy foods. Their love of these common foods can lead to these pests creating big headaches for you over your food supply. That’s why were are here to help you learn how to kill sugar ants! The most important thing to understand is how to prevent these little buggers from crowding in your home in the first place.
To prevent sugar ants infestations before they become a problem, there are some simple steps you can take. When I teach people how to kill sugar ants, the first thing I suggest is keeping a clean kitchen! This is one of the most important steps when learning how to kill sugar ants. Make sure that you keep your counter tops clean, wiped up, and free of sugar, and food debris and spills. Even something as small as a few sugar crystals spilled on your counter from the morning coffee can have sugar ants invading your kitchen by nightfall. One of the most effective strategies I tell people when teaching them how to kill sugar ants is wiping your counter tops and sink with bleach. Not only will these disinfect and clean up any mess, the bleach also breaks down the pheromones that ants sense to follow each other to food sources. This will work wonders if you make sure to scrub down counter tops and the kitchen sink with bleach. While you’re learning how to kill sugar ants, it’s also important to realize that of course wiping down a kitchen sink with bleach will only be effective if you be sure to keep dishes cleaned up and not piled up in the sink with food on them. If you leave dirty dishes lying in the sink overnight and leave any standing water in the sink, you are inviting sugar ants to invade your kitchen.
Keep your floors clean! Prepare a bleach and water solutions for mopping and then sweep and mop your kitchen floors very well. For anyone who wants to know how to kill sugar ants, this is one of the keys to being successful. Pay special attention to corners and hard-to-reach areas and make sure to sweep up all debris and food. Then mop everywhere with the bleach solution, also making sure to get corners and hard-to-reach areas. The best thing to do when learning how to kill sugar ants is to make sure that you only eat in the kitchen. If you do eat in other areas of our home, be sure to vacuum thoroughly after eating. Make sure to regularly vacuum all floors regardless if you eat in the areas or not.
Now let’s get to the methods for killing sugar ants. When I teach people how to kill sugar ants, the method I push above any of the other methods for killing sugar ants is the boric acid method. Boric acid is a natural derivative of the
mineral boron and is used in certain saline solutions and borax. When I teach people how to kill sugar ants, one of the first things I tell them to do is pick up a bottle from your local drug store. It’s very cheap, about $2.00 a bottle. Now what we need to do is create a mixture in a medium-sized container. Use a container with a lid so you can seal it off and save the extra for later. We want to mix equal parts of sugar and boric acid. Put this mixture in milk carton caps or in other similar low-brimmed, or even flat, caps. When teaching people how to kill sugar ants before, I have even just instructed them to put it on small plates. Just get the mixture in areas you know the ants are frequenting. This will cause ants to take the mixture because they are attracted to the sugar and they will take it back to their colonies. They will feed it to all the the queen and other ants in the nests and kill off the entire colony. When I teach people how to kill sugar ants, I always make sure to let them know that this may take a few days. They will continue sending more workers to get the boric acid and sugar mixture, and they will continue eating it and killing off more and more until they are all dead and gone from your home. Now you can also take the boric acid and dust it in areas you have seen sugar ants. Dust or blow it in cracks, take off outlets and light switch covers, and dust some in the metal casing.
If you are wondering how to kill sugar ants naturally, there are some great ways to do so. Natural methods can be very effective in dealing with sugar ant problems. And unlike harsh chemical solutions for killing ants, they pose no danger to animals or kids. First method you should consider when learning how to kill sugar ants and how to kill sugar ants naturally is the dish soap method. Just grab a spray bottle and some dish soap. Fill a spray bottle with water and a healthy squirt of dish soap, and mix it up well. Use this dish soap solution to spray ants you see, or even take it outside to spray ant hills. When trying to understand how to kill sugar ants, it is important to know that they will send scouts into your home and try to find a suitable place to invade. So if you catch some sneaking around, just get your spray bottle of dish soap solutions and spray them. This will kill them and assure they don’t make it back home to alert others. Before you spray all of them, try to find out where they came in from. You will want to know how they are accessing your home so you can put the boric acid that we talked about above.
I hope this article has helped you learn how to kill sugar ants. If you stick with the methods, you will be successful! For more information on how to kill other annoying bugs, rodents, weeds, or nearly anything you need help killing, head to our home page here at How To Kill Stuff.
