Got ants in your camper?

[PackRat]

OK, you are getting ready to go out and mount your camper but have found that ants are now making their way into it as they have found something you overlooked when you dismounted it previously. I hade an ant problem at home for about a week or so in the cat feeder near the rack door and in my bedroom on the window sill. I could wipe up maybe 50 at a time but next morning or in the evening the little %$&#@ were still marching in an out.

I put the automatic cat feeder up and away on a sideboard that Rusty used to sit on to watch for birds near the back door and isolated anything that touched the window sill in my bedroom to no avail; they'd be back soon enough.

I gave up and went to the ACE hardware. I could choose between the TERRO closed ant trap or the the plain "ANT KILLER" version which I bought. It comes with lottle tear-off targets that you put a drop of the clear liquid on and place in their march route. I placed a rug over the one by the rear door and put a paperweight in the corner of the window sill with the 1" x 1" square behind it and closed the shades so Rusty could not get at them.

Next morning the window sill looked like a bttleground with ants twitching, going in slow circles and just plain dead. I cleaned up them up and reapplied for one more night. I checked under the rug where they were travelling to the cat food and saw only one or two moving amidst a dozen or so dead.

You have to leave this stuff there and maybe reapply some liquid in case there are stragglers or the nest sends out scouts again. That was four days ago....now, zero ants!

Kills all common household ants and contains Borax which is the product found in most ant poisons. Be careful around pets but I think the problem will be solved pretty fast if you have the little $&#@ in your camper....or in other locations if SAFELY used.

 

[klahanie]

Glad you got it sorted, with no damage to your pet.

Kills all common household ants and contains Borax which is the product found in most ant poisons.

Glad you got it sorted, with no harm to your pets.

We go straight to the Borax. Mix in about same amount of sugar. Add just enough water to bind the grains to each other. Put in a closed margarine/dip container with holes cut in the sides. Like you say, takes a few days.

 

[Wandering Sagebrush]

Terro works wonders. It takes a few days for it to get all through the colony, but it wipes them out.

 

[Andy Douglass]

We have bad ants at our house at different times of the year. Anything sweet that it not sealed goes in the fridge (sugar, honey, maple syrup, etc). We get swarms sometimes in the house too. We had ants get into our FWC once.

We use Terro and have better results with that than anything else we have tried. Sometimes it takes a while for it to kill a colony, but eventually it works. We use the self contained Terro traps which are less messy once you figure out how to use them. When they were in our camper, we just put some of the Terro on pieces of cardboard in the camper and they were gone pretty quick. Now my wife puts a ring of some kind of red pelletized ant poison around the jack feet when the camper is parked.