Ants are part of our ecosystem. Some of them are helpful to us. But the rest of them increases our problems with what they do. Ants invasion becomes pathetic when you don’t know how to get rid of ants outside permanently.
They come from outside and start damaging the environment in structurally and other ways. So, what will you do if ants surround your house?
First, you need to find the hideouts of ants. You can also find the types of ants at your yard, garden, lawn, etc. places depending on their behaviours, preferences in their diet, etc. As an example, you can find the carpenter ants on the trees of your garden. To eliminate the ants permanently, you can choose either pesticides or natural ingredients or homemade remedies.
Using pesticides:
Purchase all-natural or biodegradable formulated insect or ant killer spray (non-repellent) to spray on the ant nests. Take an ounce of pesticide and make a solution in a gallon of water. Then use the sprayer to spray on the ant colonies.
Do it twice in a week, and after that, there will be no ants anymore. The non-repellent spray keeps ants away from entering into the nest repeatedly. Use the garden hose to reach the toughest corners.
You can also choose granular pesticides as an alternative. Granular pesticides are poisonous, and they look like ants’ desirable food. Put on gloves, some of these pesticides and spread them thoroughly on the soil, or the areas of your outside home.
Ants will come to take them as food and carry them to their nest. When they start consuming them, the poison won’t let them spread anymore.
Bait traps are also a satisfactory idea if you don’t want to spray with your hands. Keep the traps near to the most infested places. Use the traps for a month if the number of ants is larger in number and then dispose of them.
Using natural alternatives:
There are lots of home remedies or natural solution to kill the ants outside of the home. Dish soap with water solution can clean the anthill well. Take regular dish soap in two tablespoons and mix it in a gallon of warm water.
Then apply the solution on the ant’s hive with sprayer. Do it slowly and let the water come in touch with the ants. The warmth and the formula of dish soap will remove the ants. Even the solution you have used won’t let ants go outside the anthill.
Boric acid is also effective in this issue. You can use liquid boric acid or powder and warm water solution to spray on the ant nests.
3 tablespoons of boric acid, a cup of sugar and 3 cups of warm water – this is how you should make a sweet mixture which will attract the ants. Use a spray bottle to spray on the areas.
Diatomaceous earth (DE) is popular for killing insects. Choose the horticultural one which won’t harm plants. Sprinkle DE outside of your home properly. Also, sprinkle them on the trails of the ants, which will show you from where they are coming.
You can make a repellent spray with orange peels and vinegar. Take the same amount of water and vinegar and put 3-4 orange in the water. Warm up the solution of these three ingredients on the stove. Steer the solution and leave them as they are for a couple of hours. Pour the solution in a spray bottle after cooling it. Then shake it and spray on the ant nests.
Glue, baby powder, essential oils such as clove or citrus oils are also helpful for reducing the ants. However, all of the mentioned methods are just for getting rid of ants outside permanently.
Do you love to take extra salts in your daily meal?
Well! It may be common for many people who love to have salty food more and more. Salt is healthy when you consume it accordingly. But the surprise is, you can use the salt to reduce the invasion of the ants. I know you’ve got a question, “Does Salt kill ants?”
Ants are small insects which commonly live nearby the humans. This allows them to collect food faster and easier. They live in a nest with groups. However, they are harmful to humans. They can cause structural damages, bring health issues to other animals.
So, the remedies or the ways to kill them properly is a vital topic. Salt can break their regular lifestyle and omit them properly. Ants don’t like salts; rather, they love to consume sweet things. So, how will you manage?
Salt is the cheapest way to kill the ants entirely. You may hear the wrong concept about salt on killing them. But salt does kill ants if you use it correctly. Time Magazine had published the article Science: Salt v. Insect in 1937, which was the beginning of choosing the salt to eliminate the insects. Dr. Vernon Raymond Haber killed the insects with few grains of a specific salt. This story introduces us to Epsom Salt. However, he was successful in killing Mexican bean beetles with this salt.
This article from the Time magazine illustrates the feeding style of ants and other likely insects. Salt has the quality to absorb the water and vapor in the air. If you keep salt in the areas having moisture, it will absorb it.
Ants use exoskeleton for breathing in and out. Salt modifies the exoskeleton which becomes an obstruction to the ants to live well. It goes inside of the ants’ body and weakens the exoskeleton. Thus, ants become slower to move and become weak to carry more food for feeding.
Not only the ants, but snails also have enmity with salt. Their mucus and other exposed parts can tolerate any kind of salt. However, salt dehydrates the exoskeleton of the ants and kills them slowly.
How can salt kill ants?
Salt can be effective in killing ants if you use it with other ingredients. Take two tablespoons of salt and mix it in 2 cups of boiling water. Then let the solution cool a bit. After that spray the solution through a sprayer. You can also spray warm water and salt solution and directly damp the anthill.
Some experts suggest creating a mixture of bran, salt, and sugar to remove the ants. The mixture will have the approximate ratio where bran is 60-65%, and sugar is 10-15% and salt 20-25%. You need to make a paste of these things and spread in the areas where you see the trail of ants. The smell of the paste will attract the ants. But this will be poison for ants.
Salt is a safe idea to use in killing the ants. It contains no harmful chemical elements which could harm the kids, pets, and other members of the family. Hope, you are now interested in killing the ants with the salt.
The answer is unpleasant to know. Bug zappers don’t work well during the day!
Image Source: healthyleaders.com
The bug zapper is a helpful device having flashlight inside it which emits Ultraviolet ray. An electric grid or field surround this light. The bugs or insects get attracted to the UV light and try to stay as closely as possible. But the electrical field becomes the poison for them.
These small bugs get electrocuted while they touch the electrical wire of the grid. All these happen just because there is light coming from a source like a bulb.
When you are putting the bug zapper in your house, luckily, they will work when using them in the evening or the whole night because there’s a lack of light in these times.
The light of the bug zapper becomes more attractive, surrounded by low light or darkness. So, the bugs come in large number onto the zapper in these times.
But in the daytime, this is quite tough for bug zappers to work well. The sunlight or daylight is brighter and more vivid than the small bug zapper light.
This competition among daylight and zapper’s light is the reason why bug zappers don’t work in the day. Because competitively less light can’t attract the bugs. Even there’s no chance to increase the light as the sunlight in any way.
Bug zapper will work in the day too. Yes, only if you put the bug zapper under a shadowy place. The environment will be quite similar to the night.
As bugs love to hide in a darker place and attracted to light, they will visit the shadowy place where you set your bug zapper. If you are on a journey and it is daytime, you need to put the device where sunlight is least than other areas.
Insecticides are the killing substances which eliminates different types of insects. When you, your family and pets or your plants are infested with bugs and insects, you need the help of insecticides.
You can use these insecticides directly, or making solutions, spraying them onto the insects or insect hides. These insecticides work specific ways. The result of insecticides can be visible at different time duration.
Systemic insecticides work inside the body of the plants. You put these in the soil, and the root of the plants absorb them and flows them to plants’ leaves, stems, and other parts. The insects can’t eat the plants and infect them.
Ingested insecticides work a bit slowly. Mixing these with other substances or food items and keeping them on the trail of the target can make them effective. Using these insecticides, you can kill the rodents, rats, cockroaches, etc.
Fungicides work on removing the fungus, rust, mold from things. They dehydrate or dry the fungi or mildews. Then eliminate the target.
The chemical compound used for killing pest is commonly known as pesticides. These compounds can be organic and non-organic. Depending on these compounds, the toxicity, performance of a pesticide is determined.
Non-organic pesticides contain a different type of chemical compounds. These are more effective than organic compounds but riskier to apply. Direct contact can bring different health issues to users.
Chlorinated hydrocarbons are popular synthetic pesticide compounds. DDT, BHC, lindane, dieldrin, chlorobenzilate, heptachlor, Methoxychlor, cyclodienes, etc. are some of the chlorinated hydrocarbons.
Parathion and malathion, diazinon, naled, methyl parathion, dichlorvos, etc. are organophosphates to create pesticides. Carbamyl, methomyl, carbofuran, etc. carbamates are rapidly detoxified.
However, the manufacturers are keeping themselves busy in using biodegradable, natural, and organic formula. Because the compounds of the pesticides can be harmful to us as well as the environment. Organic pesticides are made from plant oils, fatty acids from the animals.
When this gets mixed with blood, the whole system becomes irregular in their actions. The biting spot becomes irritating and itchy. This itchiness can start from the time the bugs bite and stay for days to weeks.
Cats are more sensitive to the ingredients of flea drops. Pyrethrin, citrus extracts, Organophosphates, etc. of flea drops are good to go on dogs’ skin. If a drop contains these ingredients lesser, then you can use the flea drop on cats. Otherwise, the result will be different.
Mosquito is a small but annoying insect. They are of different types depending on their size, color, living styles. Aedes albopictus or the (Asian) tiger or forest mosquito has black and white stripes on its body. These mosquitoes are larger in number in the Asian countries though they are spread to other countries too.
The size of this mosquito is in between 2-10 mm approximately. Male mosquitos are almost 20% smaller than the females.
These mosquitoes are quite significant for their living habits. They are almost close to human beings. Like other daylight bugs, they fly, bite and feed in the day.
Evening and the early morning are their favorite time to seek for blood. The white stripes with black color resemble as the tiger. This is the reason; these are popularly known as tiger mosquitos.
This type of mosquito is the reason for developing health issues in the human body. They carry the viral pathogens and germ, especially yellow fever virus, dengue, and Chikungunya fever. They also become the host of a deadly Zika virus.
To keep the mosquito away, you need to follow several things. You should keep your surrounding clean properly. Don’t let water to accumulate in a place for a long time. Contact with experts or doctors to get more suggestions.
Bug bites are annoying, sore, and unbearable. We live in a world where bugs depend on human and other animals to feed them. This is why we always have to carry the marks or signs of those bites.
Each of these bugs has different bite pattern; clustered, straight line, alienated, or spread over the body. They are itchy, painful, sensitive on the skin. If you see small red marks or bumps in a straight line or parallel line on your skin, definitely you have bad days.
Bed bug bites in a line which are mostly visible on back, legs, neck, and arms. They look similar to mosquito bites. You will face itchiness first. They get bigger or raised in size when you scratch them.
Insecticides, pesticides – these two words are sometimes confusing as they both do the same thing. Both of them used to kill something, eliminate something. People are seen to use any of these two words and applying them in similar terms. But there’s a bit difference between these two words.
Insecticides are pesticides which are used to kill the insects. But pesticides are applicable in managing, repelling, and killing the pests. However, there are several types of insecticides or pesticides available on the market. Their ingredients, toxicity, effect, etc. are different from one to others. Insecticides can be organic and inorganic.
Inorganic insecticides are usually 3 types: systemic, contact, and ingested.
Systemic insecticides are used in the soil, which is absorbed by the plants. The insects can’t attack the plants.
Contact insecticides are used to kill household bugs and insects. Mosquitoes, bedbugs, lice, ants, etc. are killed by contact insecticides. You can find the contact insecticides in the different form of sprays, coils, liquid vaporizers, and repellents.
Ingested insecticides can kill the rats, rodents, cockroaches, etc.
Herbicides are different kind of pesticides to remove infected plants. Fungicides can enroot the fungus, mold, mildew, and rusts from the soil and other surfaces.
Which Insecticide Is Most Effective?
Organic insecticides are formulated from plant oils, fatty acids from animals. They are less harmful to humans as well as the environment. Insecticidal soap, nicotine, plain water, etc. are considered as organic insecticides.
However, there are more things available which are connected to pesticides or insecticides. Algaecides, biopesticides, miticides, molluscicides, avicides, rodenticides, etc. are some of them. All of these have a specific purpose of applying on. They can be used in both a positive and negative way.
