Welcome to The Grok Shop!
You're witnessing a deterioration of an ant
trail in my garage using some concoction I brewed up and today I will talk about
these ants that I'm dealing with are called Linepithema Humile
and they're also known as Argentine ants and credits to these images in the
description below that I'm using. But you can see it has turned into a worldwide problem.
And in red here you can see where they spread in the US. They're a particular
problem because of the way that they've attacked agriculture they actually farm
aphids, they kill ladybugs (which kill aphids), and they also wipe out native ant
colonies in a pretty massive way and this results in certain native
species not been able to find the grub they normally get so in that way it
disrupts the overall food chain. One thing about this species is they come
from an area that's very high in humidity and moisture and they do prefer
very moist environments on the summer time in Southern California
you may see that they come out a lot because it becomes so dry that come out
looking for water mainly, but they do also come out looking for food. And foods
they like include sweet stuff, oily protein based stuff and we'll use some
of that to our advantage here in a minute
so yeah I've been showing some good information I found on the web and I
particularly like this book by Moffett "Adventures Among Ants". I highly recommend
you check it out. I've checked it out in online archive.org here. But it's got
great information; the Argentine ant chapter was very informative. I've also
been in contact with David Holloway a researcher at UCSD about the waring
super colonies. So, when I first started battling these ants, I was using the Terro
antkiller; it was the best one I found and it was pretty effective but the cost was
kind of high so basically I did my best to reverse-engineer what they did and
knowing that boric acid you know is the main ingredient and a certain level of
sugar is needed I did some research on the right proportions and basically
proceeded to make my own ant killer in mass quantities because I have a lot of
land to defend but if you don't have the time I definitely recommend the Terro.
It's a good product. This is just a more cost-effective approach for bigger
problems. Now the key point to remember when using this boric acid sugar
mixture is you don't want to make it so toxic that the ants die right away upon
ingesting the mixture. What you want is a mildly toxic solution that allows them
to carry that back to the queens and thereby wipe out the whole nest. And the
queen's actually come out. You'll see them sometimes; a unique feature about
this species is: there's multiple queens per per colony. And these queens don't
have wings or anything; they're about two to three times bigger than the standard
worker Argentine Ant. But the idea is to have the
ideal level of toxicity and I think I've gotten pretty close
with this formula here and I'll post upper formula here in a minute but
pretty much all the ingredients I'm showing here or just sugar and boric
acid. The stuff I have is called Roach Prufe, but you can get your boric acid
in all kinds of different forms. Definitely don't buy the stuff at the
drugstore which is pharmaceutical grade or whatever. Just.. you want
standard boric acid stuff. And then what I do is I make it in a six ounce batch
and I have the right proportions for six ounces here you can see I'm using a six
ounce jam jar. Dicken's strawberry jam I think it was.. pretty good stuff; I highly
recommend that. Now to make everything dissolve really well, make
sure you use hot water and I find it easier just to pour the dry ingredients
in first, then pour the hot water on top and then give it a good shake!
By the way, if you're thinking about using insecticides for these ants... just
forget it. It's very ineffective and additionally
of course that's environmentally unsound. So. this is definitely the way to go.
It pretty much goes without saying, but be sure your sugar that you're using for
this is isolated from the sugar you use for cooking and whatnot
you wouldn't want to path back from the boric acid into your food!
I think it's mildly toxic; I won't kill you probably but (I mean, unless you ate a lot of
it). Uhhh, just don't do that.
OK, once you've got your potion all mixed up & ready to go, you need to think
about your deployment containers. What I use is these little baby food bottles. I
punch some holes in the top for the ants to be able to get in and out. And
it's pretty effective because it maintains the humidity and prevents a fast
evaporation and it will eventually evaporate but if it's evaporating at
that rate you probably aren't killing many ants. So... it will last for some days
in these jars. There are some drawbacks to the jars the biggest of which is if
you don't have a way to put the jar against the ant line that's coming in
and a certain angle where they can easily get to it some of the ants won't
go through the trouble or trying to climb up a jar that's laying sideways on
the ground or top layer so in certain situations you may want to take a cap
and just throw some in there or even drip some on the floor as I showed in
that earlier time lapse video these ants will demolish stuff that's dripped on
the floor from this concoction. And they'll do it in no time and you won't
have anything left there's no sticky stuff. It's pretty amazing.
Of course, when you find ants in your house you want to battle them in your house
but then you want to take the battle outside the house. Find out where they're
coming in and get busy protecting your perimeter. And uhhh... one last time lapse video
for y'all here show me doing just that.
Now when fighting these ants outside, one thing to keep in mind is: they prefer to
hunt at night when it's cool. When the Sun comes out, they'll thin right out but
that doesn't mean the battle is over leave your concoction out for at least
another night as I'll do here. And as they will return and then after that... should
be no more ants.
There you have it. That's how it's done. thanks for watching.