What is the best way to get rid of a stubborn ant colony?
Those little poison blocks sold at the hardware store dont work
I tried borax last summer and they just moved a few yards and started a new colony there.
So what have yous had success with to get rid of the colony long term?

The borax/sugar ant bait recipe is:

1 cup sugar
1½ tablespoons borax
1½ cups warm water

Mix it together and soak into small pieces of cloth and place it near their trails. Bounty Paper Towel pieces work well. It will kill the whole colony, but takes around 4 days usually.

Sevin Dust on their holes will kill ever ant that touches it very quickly. I prefer using Sevin, where I can get close to the colony's heart.

Keith

I used detadust on the old colony under my concrete. It took 3years to fully control.
I was old,

My golf course clients, nursery owners and small time veggie farmers have all gone to 30% Vinegar for both weed control and insect control....less dangerous chemical use and very potent. Stinks a day but good.

I think you need to know what kind of ant you have. What do they eat? If it's meat-fat eaters mix borax 50-50 and let them take it to the queen and nurse ants. Sugar the same story. No expert here but that's what I would try. You need to kill the queen for sure.

Thanks Keith.
so when I mix up the sugar borax water solution do I lay the paper towell over the colony holes and then apply the solution.and do you re soak every day for the 4 days?

Thanks guys for all the suggestions.
They are the little black ants,dont know what they eat.
So that is 30 percent vinegar and 70 percent water and pour a bucket in the holes?

Where do you get detadust and what is it.
You should have applied it barefoot Dave it might have cured your toenail fungus.

Put a little piece of fat or tuna out and see if they swarm it. That would tell you if they're meat eaters pretty fast. I don't have much luck getting the meat eaters to work sugar baits.

You're welcome.

The closer you can get the bait to the queen the better. The cloth, or cotton balls, or paper towel pieces just hold the bait so the ants can find and eat it. The ants eat the mix off the material and carry the sugar and inadvertently the borax, back to the colony to feed the queen and larvae, in a stomach designed for that, that they can empty. The borax kills the queen and larvae, that could develop into new queens, destroying the colony.

If the ants eat all the bait and are still active, I would add more bait.

Keith

OK good to know.
I can get right on top of the colonys they are on the front lawn.
They cant get in the house but see the odd one occasionally on the driveway
When I run the lawn mower over their mounds they are hoaching around for a while.
I'll try out the borax sugar water method and the vinegar water method on different mounds.

I use pure 30% vinegar...no water added

We get those tiny ants in the house every spring, wife calls them "sugar ants"....the Terro ant poison is a borax/sugar pre mix gel you put in their path, they swarm the bait and in a day or two no more ants...
Don't know if the sugar/borax mix works on outside ants, can't hurt to try.
My son has fire ants at his place, he said it's like playing whack a mole, treat one hill, and another pops up a few feet away. He finally has someone treat the whole yard with some kind of granules. No more ants, fleas, or ticks....

Delta Dust has Deltamethrin in it. I don't know where you get it.

I use Sevin Dust (Carbaryl) and a puffer mostly for wasps and hornets but it is effective on ants too.

Sevin Dust

I put a small amount of dry borax/sugar in an old baby food jar and poke a hole in the lid. Put it hear the ant hills. Its rainproof. works well.
just

Termidor SC is what you want. Unfortunately, you probably can't legally purchase it in Canada. I treated my yard with it 3 years ago, still no ants. It was infested with ants prior to that.

Line mismanagement.
If you kill the predator wasps,
like yellow jackets etc,
the ants and aphids will increase.

I use borax

This! If you wanna stop messing around and get rid of them,this is what you want.works great on red wasp too!

buy a product called Termidor SC.
Its not really a pesticide it cause a virus in colonies. A quart has last 15 years. Only need a little in a sprayer. Don't drown the ants, let them walk in it. You will be ant free in 2 days. Any type of ants.
Great with carpenter ants since you can never find the home. Even if they are living in a tree. Like I said don't try to drown them. if you have little sand mounds all over your yard they will be gone the next day.

When we were little, we stole aerosol cans of bug spray (dichlorovos) and sprayed it into the colony entrances. When the ants began to run out and die, we'd use matches to switch to flammenwerfer mode. It was fun but punishable when adults caught us.

Borax works, you can mix it with egg yolk and sugar until it's like play-doh in consistency, form marble-sized pieces and spread where there are ants. It's more attractive than just sugar. I'm thinking adding a bit of glycerine into the mix will improve it because it won't dry out as fast.

Also, biocontrol works. You can order some Beauveria spores, it will infect and weaken the colony and will deter future queens from recolonization. Combined methods always work better.

Thanks for all the info everyone.
I will try the more readily available methods first and move on to the other methods if I have no sucess.
The ants dont really bother me but they make my lawn look ugly.

"The ants dont really bother me but they make my lawn look ugly."

LOL, my "lawn" is ugly too...but I don't care, as long as it's green ish, it's all good...

Burn them. As a teen working on our little ranch in Oregon, I got rid of many ant colonies. We had several types of ants, but the real buggers that had big colonies, and built big piles, were the reds and the red and blacks. After trying multiple products and various teenage-type ideas, including scraping the ant piles flat with a tractor blade, I just soaked their hills with gasoline and lit it up. Let the gas soak in for a minute or so, then add another dose. Do NOT just toss a match or burning paper towel on the pile! I poured a gas trail from the pile to about 10 feet away and lit that. In hindsight, a diesel trail would have been better.
The result was always the end of that colony.

https://www.reddit.com/r/funnyvideos/comments/1huyjqj/man_blows_up_backyard_trying_to_kill_a_pest/

))))

LOL Tatiana.
I dont want the fire department at my house.

Inside I like Adivon bait gel. Works great. Better than the Terro stuff from Lowe’s. Outside for spot testing a fire ant mound I use Rainbow Ant poison pellets. Kills them fast. Two days at most.

Boco... have you tried leasing an ant eater..?

I am a commercial operator so what we can use, the average consumer can be limited. However, Fipronil is the active ingredient in a few ant and termiticide products. It is a transfer kill mode of operation which is very effective with the proper application. A couple of 7 to 10 days or less is the average length of time needed to achieve control of (a) or multiple ant colonies.

They also have a good carpenter and small ant bait that is very effective if applied in the active foraging areas. Advance carpenter ant bait is an excellent bait to use along with a liquid application. Advance 375A is a small ant type of bait with a broad label of ants.

permethrin. mix to recommended strength mostly .05%, spray the mound, soak it good, they will be dead.

Pour molten aluminum down their hole. Ants are gone and if you dig up the nest, you have a cool sculpture.

I use the same stuff gcs uses called Terro. I works well on the ones that turn up in the house. It seems to take longer since their recipe was changed a few years back. I believe the original stuff had arsenic (sp?) in it.

J...funny you mentioned that.....I must of had a large ,or multiple colonies one spring that was eating the Terro but was still coming back for days, usually they're gone in a day....So I called Terro's hotline...they swore the formula hasn't ever been changed and just give it time....The ants finally stopped and I haven't had a problem like that again....