Terro Ant Bait

Terro Ant Bait should be put down for a few weeks or even a month or more in order to guarantee complete success. If you put the Terro ant bait near the carpenter ant nests, you may see a small pile of dead ants there the next day. These mounds of dead ants are called midden piles. They are the dead ants that have been taken out of the nest by survivors, which obviously means that there are still at least a few ants left in the colony, which means that you have to keep on baiting for a few more weeks.

Terro Ant Bait

You can either buy Terro ant bait traps or you can make your own. Making your own Terro ant bait traps is easy and probably a lot cheaper as well. If you want to make your own, buy liquid Terro ant killer and put it on balls of cotton wool or pieces of cardboard.

Place a few of these in jam jars for which you still have the lid. Put the lid on and the puncture it several times with a Phillips-type screw driver, so that you get round holes.

Make sure that the holes are large enough to allow ants to come and go freely then lay them on their sides on known ant trails. You can put the jam jars in or outside your house.

Once you notice that the number of ants inside the house has dwindled significantly, only put the Terro ant bait traps outside the house or you are only attracting them back inside, albeit to their deaths.

Terro ant bait is made from boric acid (borax) and a sugary substance. Boric acid is rather tasteless to ants but they love sugar, well most ants do anyway, so the ants consume the boric acid with the sugar. Boric acid is deadly to ants and many other insects, because it destroys their nervous systems causing paralysis. However, to humans and our domestic animals, it is only slightly more toxic than salt.

Using Terro ant bait in jars like this is not a precaution against children or pets eating it, using jars, just makes it easier to find the bait to replenish it, it makes it easier to move around if one ant trail stops being used and it keeps the rain of the ant bait. If you were to put the Terro ant bait out on a piece of tile, glass or cardboard, you would have to re-bait after rainfall.

All the Terro ant bait and ant killers, be they sprays, liquids or granules work in the same way. They use boric acid mixed with sugar to temp the foraging workers to take the boric acid back to the nest. The boric acid is not mixed in a high enough concentration to kill the foragers there and then, that is not the point.

You want the workers to take the Terro ant bait back to the nest and feed it to all their friends and family, including all the flying ants and the queen. Once the queen has eaten Terro ant bait, she will die and once she is dead, there will be no more eggs and the colony will die soon too.