Re: for ants, I use Terro, but I hear diatomaceous earth is good too, espeically if its not the kind of ants that like the Terro bait.
For caulk, the only black stuff I used was supposed to be for around fire places, trying to make a better seal around the unit as my wife was very sensitive to the old smoke smell that would waft in.
All I will add is that it can be very satisfying to experiment with a wide variety of different caulks. You may even find opportunity to use more than one in a given situation.
Also, don’t be afraid to try different kinds of caulks. I myself have a lovely silicon caulk that I like to use for the right application, complete with a nice custom fit harness to keep it well secured while using it. You don’t want to drop your caulk while using it!
Or for the non-poison route… cinnamon. Wherever you find ants, especially if you can find the entry point(s), sprinkle cinnamon. If you don’t know where exactly they are entering the property, start with a broader boundary line that ends against the wall, if able.
Source: every spring, I have ants invade my kitchen counter through a window near my sink. I lay a heavier shake of cinnamon around the infested area [go no further], a softer layer inside the boundary [muddle scent trails], and once they have mostly vacated back the way they came…a heavy dosing of my window sill [and STAY out]. Then clean up the counter (in my case, including alcohol wipe after), and leave the cinnamon on the sill until early summer, then vacuum away.
YMMV
Diatomaceous earth is not a poison. It is non toxic to animals. It is an irritant. Specifically to the eyes and mucous membranes.
It kills small insects because it cuts their soft tissues and dries them out. Essentially death by a thousand cuts.
But sure, if cinnamon works i have no objection to that. Might be a bit more expensive though methinks.
Content warning: serious ant control comment: I had a really terrible ant problem, and after spending a lot of money buying boxes and boxes of Terro for years, I finally just mixed my own borax sugar water. And I have to say, it made me realize: Terro sucks. It provided only modest knock-backs of the ant problem - it would take days to have an effect, then there would be a lull that only lasted a few days before they came back again, but as soon as I switched to a home made mixture, filling the empty Terro plastic containers, the ant problem disappeared entirely. Some weeks later a few ants started showing up again, I put out a little more bait, and it never developed into a problem. The difference is so stark, it’s making me wonder if Terro deliberately make their product ineffective so you have to constantly buy more of it. In theory they should have worked the same way, as they have the same ingredients - I suspect Terro’s formula doesn’t have enough borax in it to do the job. The only problem is that I bought a box of borax, thinking I’d have to constantly put out bait like I did with the Terro, and I’ve only used a fraction of a teaspoon…
But wrt the headline: yes, how to choose, both so handsome.
Remember that lengthy chapter in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” where he somehow makes ants go away by careful manipulation of their chemical trails? I don’t seem to see that technique come up very often. Either it requires overly elaborate time-consuming observation or its effectiveness was wildly exaggerated, I reckon.
Terro only works on sweet-eating ants. It does say that on the package.
As I said, I replaced the Terro with a formulation that should have been identical - borax sugar water - and it did the job the Terro couldn’t do. (My recipe seems to have a lot more borax, though.) The ants were slurping up the Terro, it just wasn’t stopping them.
I need to try this, thanks. As a farmer in a very old farmhouse, the ant battle in the warm months is matched only by the mice battle in the cold. Judicious application of cat has fought the mice to a standstill but the murderbeasts don’t seem to like eating ants for some reason. And Terro seems to appeal to them but not eliminate the ants, just as you’ve described. The only thing that works is some highly toxic, old-timey poison my mother in law gave me that contains something like strychnine or cyanide or something equally awful. I used it once a couple years ago (hidden inside a cabinet the cats couldn’t reach) and it worked a treat but I’m real hesitant to use it again.
The difference between the effects of the Terro and homemade was pretty stark - I was giving up hope of ever getting a handle on the ant problem, and then I tried my mixture and suddenly I no longer had an ant problem. I’m doing something in the vicinity of 1 TB of borax to 1 cup of water with a 1/4 cup of sugar - roughly, since I’m making a lot less than a cup at a time. (I tried a recipe that mixes borax with peanut butter for protein-loving ants, but I don’t know if it works, since the sugar water takes them out so quickly they never got around to it.)
TIL…I knew of its use in insect control but always assumed there was a “poison” element, since it was in with other varmit and critter control in the garden shop.
If you believe WebMD:
Be extra careful around filter-grade diatomaceous earth. Inhaled crystalline silica particles can build up in your lungs and lymph nodes. Long-term inhalation of diatomaceous earth has been linked to several health conditions, including lung cancer, silicosis, and other respiratory diseases.
ETA: If you want to see the earlier SNL sketch this is clearly based on: 中英| SNL| 簧爆谐音梗扣钱！_哔哩哔哩_bilibili
“…it sometimes get sticky if it gets hard.”
Hey, who doesn’t?
It’s nice they’re color-coded like that.
Son, if you got ants like that you have a water infiltration issue. Fix the water issue, fix the ant issue. /r/DIY
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