8-Count TERRO Outdoor Liquid Ant Bait Stakes

I've tried using these stakes and variations of them without any success. They just litter the yard eventually and ant populations are unaffected.

What worked for me is Taurus SC [diypestcontrol.com]. It's expensive but one bottle should last you for years as it's highly concentrated. (Add about 1 ounce to a gallon sprayer; the bottle auto measures)

Spray around the perimeter of the house and where ants like to congregate outdoors. In about 2 weeks the ants will be gone.

Taurus SC is the best product I've tried to keep insects out of my home. It brings a tear to my cheap basterd eye thinking how much money I spent trying inferior products over the years; I guess lessons don't come cheap

Please be very careful with this stuff. Fipronil is especially deadly to all social insects, including beneficial ones like bees. The "transfer effect" can be devastating for honey bees.

Even if that works, it will only kill some of the worker ants. The colony will raise more ants to replace them, and the gum will have no long-term effect. To control ants, you need to kill the queen. Which involves workers taking the bait back to the colony, where it's used to feed others including the queen.


Active ingredient in Taurus SC is Fipronil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fipronil
http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/fipronil.html

Active ingredient in AMDRO is Hydramethylnon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydramethylnon
http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/hydragen.pdf

Active ingredient in Terro is Borax, which is the mildest of the three.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borax
http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/boricgen.html


I think that's too much borax. I tried that ratio before and the ants just avoided it. As in I put a few drops of it directly in the path of an ant trail which went over porcelain tiles (so it wouldn't absorb the water). A few of them investigated it, but when I checked an hour later the ant trail just wait around the bait.


Yes Terro is a borax mix. But I spent a couple years mixing my own batches of borax and sugar water, and coming up with all sorts of contraptions to place it around the yard in ways where it wouldn't spill, leaves couldn't get into it, and the dog wouldn't lap it all up.

That's when I realized out that Terro isn't just a borax mix. It's also a dispenser which holds the borax mix inside. A custom-made dispenser which is far more convenient and elegant than the jerry-rigged dispensers I was trying to make. I now consider the price of these Terro boxes to be the price of the dispenser, and refill them with my own borax solution when they run dry.