Curious things pests do.

[JR8]

Ants discovered, living in the water container of our coffee machine.





(@SMS, hope I got this adequately resized down)

[Max Headroom]

I can do you one better. I had an ant on the inside of my display last year. I could see it walk over the letters that I typed and all other Windows contents, literally on the inner side of the screen, kinda like a Tron ant.

[zane8080]

very interesting, they usually live in places where it wont be touched for a long long time. Lived in my printer cartridge box.

[zzm9980]

Ants discovered, living in the water container of our coffee machine.





(@SMS, hope I got this adequately resized down)

For some reason this month ants have been crazy in our place. They seem to be going in and out of our fuse box now. I just spray down around it,but they come back a day later.

[JR8]

For some reason this month ants have been crazy in our place. They seem to be going in and out of our fuse box now. I just spray down around it,but they come back a day later.

Curious, as we are experiencing similar. I've tried the usual ant-baits but that doesn't seem to be doing much. Liberal amounts of spray fend them off for a few hours, but then they re-appear having just altered their path by maybe a foot.

I thought they might be coming in through the kitchen window (left slightly ajar for ventilation), but then I've also seen them coming out of the sink overflow. They had one trail weaving off, only for it to ultimately end near the beginning at a pack of raisins in a cupboard. Similar happened, a trail of them off to the bomb shelter, but I never figured that one out. And again just yesterday a trail to/from the kitchen waste bin.

A few years ago in similar'ish circumstances I eventually found their nest (grim!) within a carrier bag of papers in the study.

Hmmm!

[zane8080]

Anyway, the ants exist for a good reason at yr home, to scavage the extra food that fell on the floor or dead insects at unreachable corners. Of course u should still cover your food and finish yr snacks at your workplace in one eating.

[JR8]

Is there an emo for 'biting tongue very hard'?

[Max Headroom]

Curiously, we hardly have ants. We do have several rather rotund-looking resident cicaks though, and a few times I've seen one of them leisurely pick off what I think were ants one by one.

So maybe there's the answer to unwanted ants in the household.

By the way, I reckon it's safe to say that cicaks also keep the mozzie population down.

Word of warning: try not to get a cicak stuck under the rotating microwave platform, because the post-zap aftermath tends to put the wife off cicaks for a considerable time.

[JR8]

It's curious. At our last place we had quite a few geckos, quite welcome by me, nay lucky too (per local folklore), they can clean up the ants and so on. Here the curious thing is I can see gecko droppings here and there, but I have never once seen or heard one inside our unit.

I've been considering something, but don't know if there's mileage in it. Could the lack of rain be driving ants indoors? a) they need water, and the ground outside is parched brown b) don't they have some form of symbiotic relationship with mold? I seem to recall reading ants 'farm' mold for food.

So when it's dry as a bone out of doors, suddenly a sink overflow, or even the water vessel of a coffee machine might have it's attractions.

Correct or not, for several reasons I would welcome a few solid days of rain.

[Steve1960]

We regularly had ants in the kitchen and every 3 or 4 months I would lay the poisoned bait but I have not needed to do it for the last 6 months, not sure why. They have just disappeared.

Used to get one or two cockroaches every now and again. I thought they were coming in under the front door so fitted a draft excluder strip but it didn't seem to help. Sealed around the washing machine waste water pipe with silicon and have not seen one since.

[the lynx]

Sometimes those ant baits (those popular ones are usually granular or pellet-based) do not work because they are just not attractive. For this case, you should look for liquid/gel-based ones. Just switch.

Ants do have different food requirement on different months/seasons, so you can't expect your favourite Combat ant baits to remain attractive after using for so long.