How to stop ant infestations

When you have a little one crawling around the house, the last thing you want is your baby to run into an army of ants. Though most people may not generally bother about ants in their home, the truth is, ants are the most difficult house sitters to remove. Once they get in, you will have a tough time deciding how to get rid of ants.

Unfortunately for someone like me, who is a tad hypochondriac, an infestation means a lot of headache. Year after year of living with these ants just made me realise that I can’t keep up with it anymore and so I decided to exterminate them.

I decided to explore and find out where these ants were coming from and to my horror, they were not coming from somewhere outside. They were right in my house, in a rather inaccessible area. Someplace from where I could see them take their germ infested bodies over my carpet but just couldn’t reach them.

How to be rid of them!

When you want to deal with ants, the best way is to poison their source. However, in my case, I had two problems. One, I had a crawling baby who is not smart enough to detect hazardous material yet and second, I just couldn’t reach their source. So in my quest to find some other ‘not-so-toxic’ methods of removing the ants from my flat, I searched the high and the low of all reference materials I could get my hands on.

When wondering, how to get rid of ants, keep in mind that there are only two ways of doing this. You can either go for the toxic methods (which will have at least a percentage of the effect that they’re going to have on the ants, on you) or you could go for the less toxic methods. There is no completely non-toxic method and if there is some method like that, trust me, it is most likely to fail.

There are many ant repellents that are available commercially. Many of these will also claim to be completely non-toxic or safe for humans but the only way to check their effectiveness is to use them and see. If you are willing to take that chance, it’s great and you may just get rid of the ant problem, though if you are anything like me, you will be skeptical about believing the claims of these insect killers. If you are planning to buy insecticides, try  Giant. You will find an array of insect killers and repellents there.

If you are thinking of using these insect repellants and insect killers, place these chemicals at a safe distance from your baby. I wouldn’t venture as far as to use a spray because that could not only be dangerous for your baby, but also for you. A better method, which I eventually did use, is to get ant bait. These are poisonous materials that the ants themselves carry to their nest.

To keep my baby safe, I left out these poisonous ant baits out at night and removed them in the morning. The chemical is supposed to kill the ants in a single day and then deter them from entering your apartment thereafter. However, be prepared to lay out the bait for a few nights so that even the last of the ants are exterminated.

Though I am not really fond of chemicals (who ever is?), I admit, I did have to resort to them to get rid of my ant problem. I had to make sure my baby didn't go near the places where I had kept the baits. Once the baits were taken by the ants, I had the areas cleaned thoroughly. Though this was a tiresome process, it worked well for me and now I have a home which is completely ant free.

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