By Tim Redmond
While the health-care bill is melting down and the global warming conference is frozen, we have some unavoidable news of a different sort: The ants are attacking.
I have ants in my house. Half the people I know are under ant attack. Dave Crow, the tenant lawyer (and one-time Guardian staffer) who writes for SF Appeal, says ants aren’t covered by city health codes and landlords don’t really have to do anything about them. Which is something I didn’t know.
The commenters on Crow’s piece say, among other things, that all you have to do is seal up all the cracks in your house with caulk and the nasty little beasts won’t get it. That’s not much help to those of us who live in older houses that have so many cracks, crevices, holes and tiny entryways that there’s no way to find them all, much less seal them all up.
Of course, you could also carefully remove every tiny scrap of food from counters, floors and sinks and seal everything in airtight bags and bins, but frankly, some of us just aren’t that clean.
We used to use vaseline, which traps the ants but makes an awful mess. Now we pour cinnamon in their path, which confuses them and sometimes sends them away. I’ve also had luck with a mixture of molasses and yeast, dropped onto small pieces of paper; the ants love the sweet stuff, and take it home to the rest of the nest — and since ants can’t fart, the yeast makes them explode. At least it’s an organic form of chemical warfare.
Other suggestions?