Use Acid and Poison to Make Homemade Ant Bait

If you have a yard infested with ant hills, and the ants can't find enough food outside, so they've invaded your home forage for food, then perhaps it's time to kill the ants at their source; the colony. You can use borax and boric acid to kill ants very quickly. Keep in mind that both are toxic chemicals, however, and you should keep them far away from children and pets. Follow these simple guidelines to use borax and boric acid to kill ants where they live:

• Boric acid has been in use in the United States since 1948, registered as a household insecticide. The dry powder attacks the exoskeleton of ants and, ingested in liquid form, the acid acts as a stomach poison, killing the ant as the stomach digests the solution. To make a homemade ant bait with boric acid for outdoor use, dissolve 1 teaspoon of powdered boric acid and ten teaspoons of sugar into two cups of water. Saturate cotton balls with the solution and place them around ant trails, ant hills, and anywhere you've seen ants outside. The ants will carry the solution back to the colony, killing the entire colony within a few days. You can also pour the solution into the ant hills if you'd rather not leave the poisonous cotton balls around your yard.
• For indoor use, you can make homemade bait for ants with borax. Combine one half teaspoon of honey with equal parts of borax and sugar substitute containing aspartame. Put the solution into small bottles, and place the bottles on their sides in places were you've seen ant activity. The ants will carry the bait back to their colonies, killing the entire colony within a few weeks. Keep in mind that borax is poisonous, so make sure that you place the bait out of the reach of children and pets.

It may take several attempts to completely rid your yard and home of ants, since colonies sometimes live in the walls of a house. While one colony dies away, other colonies may have already generated. Persistence will be rewarded with an ant-free home and yard after a few rounds of treatment.