Hi all,
I have been dealing with ants for about 4 months... Over that time, I have researched and used every humane method I can find (including the ones on another thread here);
- using various spices (such as cinnamon), bicarbonate of powder, mint oils, garlic, vinegar etc (this list isn't exhaustive) to make barriers
- using more vinegar, then after that bleach, to clean floors to cover pheromone trails
- keeping everything super clean
- making sure there's no open food sources
- putting a food source outside of the house to tempt them away from the inside (quite far away so they'd be more likely to set up camp in the garden rather than in the house)
- finding EVERY little nook and cranny possible and filling/covering them (this took a LOT of time as they kept finding new ones)
- sweeping the ants trapped inside the house and letting them out in the garden (the number of ants I've done this with now easily reaches the hundreds if not thousands)
- at one point a huge amount of them got drowned in a sewage leak we had in April (which some of you may remember had my whole family violently ill with vomiting and diarrhoea for 3 weeks), which was then promptly followed with a super strong cleansing with bleach etc, but EVEN THEN they came back!!!
Unfortunately, even though each remedy SEEMED to work, eventually they would come back, and I'd try the remedies again but it's almost as if they didn't care this time around!
We are now at a point where there are THOUSANDS upon thousands ALL OVER the place. They live INSIDE the wall of the kitchen and they are just impossible to contain, there are walking ones and flying ones everywhere, and every time we fill the holes they find another, we have them walking over the counters, all over the freezer and in the filaments/motor workings of it etc, and we've had to remove everything from that side of the kitchen full stop, because they're just uncontrollable... As it is, the flying ones are now coming out of the kitchen (albeit only a few) and I can forsee this could spill into others parts of the house...
It's got to the point where, even though our ants don't seem to be the kind that bites, they are a threat because they walk over all kinds of shite (especially since they live close to the point where the sewage had entered the house) and to have them walking all over (clean) dishes, counter tops and food, is not safe...
We've just tried one last go at filling all the holes we can reach (which are under/behind all the sink and kitchen cupboards) with silicone, but so far this only stops them temporarily and they find other (invisible to the naked eye) holes to come through... Cross fingers that won't be the case this time...
However, as I don't expect it to work, if they appear again, I am now leaning towards the "as far as practical and possible" part of the vegan definition and considering pest control (well, it's really my husband that was considering ant killer, and my thought was that pest control could also deal with PREVENTION after the dirty deed is done, so that more ants don't have to suffer the same fate)... But it's really REALLY hard to feel that this is enough of a reason for me to do the un-vegan thing (albeit, if I don't do it, my husband will).
I genuinely don't know what else I can do though.
Has any body got ANY ideas, or has anyone had to get pest control in before?
What's a vegan to do?
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