How to Kill Ants in the Kitchen

kill ants terro

I hate those articles that draw everything out with useless babble only to tell you the solution to your problem at the very end. I don’t want to do that to you. Of course, if you want to read a little bit more about my experience with this product, or what it does to the ants and how it works, then feel free to read on, but if you’ve got ants coming into your kitchen, or any room in your house, the answer to your problem is simple…

TERRO Ant Killer

TERRO ant killer comes in a few different varieties, all of which can be purchased through places like Amazon, Home Depot, or more local hardware stores (or where insect killers are sold). The active ingredient in TERRO ant killer is borax, which is poisonous to ants and will do a pretty good job of clearing up a colony that might be trying to live in your home rent free.

As I mentioned, the product comes in a few different forms, but the most popular, according to me, are the traditional TERRO Ant Killer and the TERRO Liquid Ant Baits. All of the different forms of the product contain the same main ingredient for killing the ants, it’s just a matter of the delivery system.

The traditional Ant Killer is a small bottle of a goopy liquid that you put onto small cardboard squares and leave around your house. The Liquid Ant Baits are self contained plastic “traps” that contain the same liquid, but also have a housing which the ants climb into in order to digest the borax.

Which is Better TERRO Ant Killer or Liquid Ant Baits?

I’ve used both products throughout my own in the past and I can say that they both work equally as well, but the Liquid Ant Baits have a slight edge because you don’t have to keep adding more solution to the trap.

With the basic ant killer, you have to place a few drops on a piece of cardboard and place it near where the ants are coming in to your home… or where you see the most ants. Then, after a while the ants will start to grab the liquid and bring it back to their colony. Of course, as they begin to bring the liquid away, less and less is on the cardboard, so you will need to continue to replace what the ants have taken away.

And oh boy will you need to replace it.

With the liquid ant bait you just cut off the end of the trap, set it near the ants and you’re good to go. There is quite a bit of ant killer inside of the pre-packaged traps, so they should last quite a while, and you can’t replace the liquid inside, so when they are gone they’re gone. Simple as that.

In pretty much all the cases where I’ve used the liquid ant baits, I’ve only had to place one near the point of entry and it’s taken care of all of them.

Which leads to me to my next point…

How Does TERRO Work and What Should I Expect?

TERRO basically works be attracting the ants to the liquid, they grab some of it, and then take it back to their colony to share with all the other unsuspecting ants. Once they start to feast on the borax, it messes with their digestive system and they die.

So since they take the borax back to their colony with them, it takes care of all the ants you see in your house, as well as all the ants you don’t see that might start making their way in.

Now, that may sound all fine and dandy, but there is a bit of a downside to the process.

When you first put the liquid out, whether it’s just the normal liquid, or a liquid ant bait plastic trap, you will see more ants come out that were in your house originally. They will literally come in droves to feast on the sweet nectar of death. At one point I had never seen so many ants in one place at one time, my wife was absolutely disgusted, but I assured here that the more the ants were eating the poison, the more ants would die in the long run. And that’s exactly what happened.

After all of the ants came out of the woodwork and started gobbling up the poison, they soon disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Now, everyone’s situation is going to be a little bit different, so it’s important to make sure that you keep the traps loaded up with the liquid until you stop seeing the ants. It can take a couple days up to a couple weeks to get rid of all the ants, depending on how many you’ve got. So just be patient and continue to put out the TERRO for them to eat.

It will work, I promise.

I’ve been using TERRO for years now, even when we lived on the 4th floor of a condo building and still got tons of ants in our unit. It’s a staple in the junk drawer and always comes out in the spring when the ants decide it’s time to search for food inside our house.

And like I said, there are a variety of different types of TERRO products, but they all contain borax which is what will kill the ants.

So you can decide if you want to go with the normal TERRO Ant Killer or the TERRO Liquid Ant Baits, but either one will take care of your problem after using them for a little while.

When we first started getting ants in our house I just kind of swept it under the rug and didn’t worry about it. But once my wife started to get really annoyed with them I knew I had to do something or it was going to become an even bigger problem.

Some friends told me about TERRO, but I was definitely skeptical. It seemed like it was too good to be true. The fact that it would just straight up kill all the ants in the house as well as all the ants in the colony over the course of a few days seemed really far fetched, but I bought it anyways.

After setting it out for the first time I was nervous about how many ants showed up in the house… way more than were there in the first place. But sure enough, a couple days later they began to thin out and eventually the ants were completely gone.

So if you’re looking for a way to get rid of those pesky ants, I can’t recommend TERRO products enough.

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