You can use vaseline to keep ants out of your crabitat by smearing it around the edges. May be effective in keeping other crawling insects out as well.

Some ideas I found on a website for repelling or killing ants without chemicals:


Repellents or things they won't cross:

Borax
Blackboard chalk
Baby powder
Petroleum jelly
Eucalyptus oil (a little on a cloth goes a long way)
Bay leaves (Keep out of reach of children and pets!)
Cinnamon
Dryer sheets
Tea tree oil
citrus peels
cucumber peels
coffee
orange oil
cloves
spearmint
grits
The herb tansy is a great ant repellant. We just put small cuttings in the window sills and it keeps them away for the season.

Avon "skin so soft" lotion. Just wipe a small bit along the door thresholds and the ants won�t cross it for months.

Not sure where you put these:

A mixture of confectioner's sugar (icing sugar) and baking soda works - put it on something that can be covered to protect it from moisture.



To destroy colonies of ants:

ammonia poured full strength into the mound

To keep annoying aggressive fire ants and their pesty ant hills away from me, I have started sprinkling cornmeal on them and that eliminates them. Ants feast on cornmeal and when they drink water with it, cannot digest it and therefore go off and die. This "cornmeal sprinkling" process must be continually repeated to guard from new fire ants invading your territory again.


Finest and cheapest way to get rid of ants.

1. I'm guessing Big Problem.
2. Buy the 1 Liter bottle of Honey, but any cheap sugar solution will work.
3. Buy a box of 20 Mule Team Borax. It's 99.5% borax.
4. Get a funnel.
5. Pour all the honey into a large bowl, and add ONLY about FIVE Tablespoons of Borax into the bowl.
6. Mix it up with a fork so all the globs of borax are finely disbursed amongnst the honey.
7. Pour it back into the 1 Liter bottle with the use of the funnel.
8. Rinse out the bowl and the funnel.
9. Go around the house and pour small globs of honey along the perimeter, and near any ant colonies you can see.

If the mixture is less than 5% borax, then the ants can take it home to the nest without it killing them immediately. ( That's why only 5 tablespoons.)
VERY IMPORTANT - Keep it less than 5% of the mixture.

The ants will take it home, everyone will eat it, and go get more and then they will die over the next 24 hours, including, most importantly, the Queen.

If you put in too much, they will die enroute and the colony will survive.'

Oh, and at just 5% solution, it shouldn't harm the soil.


I do know that you can mix about 3 capfuls of mouthwash(I use Listerine)and a good squirt of dish soap to a gallon or so of water & pour it on the ant bed. It'll knock em dead but you gotta soak the bed thoroughly to get all of them.


ANT CONTROL TONIC #1
4 to 5 tbsp. cornmeal
3 tbsp. bacon grease
3 tbsp. baking powder
3 packages of yeast (I would opt for the rapid rise)
Mix cornmeal & bacon grease into a paste, then add baking powder &
yeast. Dab the gooey mix on the insides of jar lids, and
set them near the ant hills.
When ants eat this mixture, they swell up and go to the big ant hill in
the sky.


Humane method to keep ants outside:


Take an empty glass jar and put sugar in it and then go outside away from the house a bit and put it on the ground. Apparently the ants will leave your house and go to the sugar. If you see ants again, add more sugar!