- 2 days ago
There is a four-dollar box of powder on the laundry shelf of nearly every grocery store in America that will empty out an entire ant colony in about a day — not just the ants you see marching across your counter, but the ones you never see, the young in the nest and the queen herself, down in the dark where no spray ever reaches.
In this video I show you exactly how to use it. What the powder is, why it works in a way no spray ever can, how to mix it, where to set it, and the one hard rule that most folks get wrong and then give up too soon. I will also tell you honestly what it cannot do, because I will not sell you only the bright side.
What you will learn:
— Why the ants on your counter are not the colony, and why killing them never works
— The white mineral that does the job for pennies, and how it travels home to the queen
— The exact proportion to mix — three parts sugar to one part borax — and why it matters
— The one thing you must NOT do once the bait is down
— What to do when the ants want grease instead of sweet
— The honest benefits and the honest drawbacks, told plain
— Why this cheap, plain method quietly stopped being talked about
A word on safety: borax is low in ha
In this video I show you exactly how to use it. What the powder is, why it works in a way no spray ever can, how to mix it, where to set it, and the one hard rule that most folks get wrong and then give up too soon. I will also tell you honestly what it cannot do, because I will not sell you only the bright side.
What you will learn:
— Why the ants on your counter are not the colony, and why killing them never works
— The white mineral that does the job for pennies, and how it travels home to the queen
— The exact proportion to mix — three parts sugar to one part borax — and why it matters
— The one thing you must NOT do once the bait is down
— What to do when the ants want grease instead of sweet
— The honest benefits and the honest drawbacks, told plain
— Why this cheap, plain method quietly stopped being talked about
A word on safety: borax is low in ha
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00There is a powder sitting on the shelf of nearly every grocery store in America, right
00:05beside the laundry soap, that will empty out an entire ant colony in about a day.
00:10It costs less than a dollar to use, it kills the workers crossing your counter, and it
00:16kills the ones you will never see, the young of the nest and the queen herself, down in
00:21the dark where no spray ever reaches.
00:23And it does this not by being stronger than the ants, but by being patient enough to let
00:29the ants do the work themselves.
00:31Your great grandmother kept a box of it on the shelf above her washtub.
00:35She did not have a telephone number for a man in a white truck.
00:38She did not have a paper to sign that billed her every spring.
00:42She had a spoon, a saucer, and about five minutes.
00:46My name is Esther Yoder.
00:48I am Amish, and I keep house with my husband on our farm here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
00:53And I am going to be honest with you the way I always am, because honesty is the only
00:58thing that makes a video like this worth your time.
01:02I will tell you what is plain and true.
01:04What this powder is, what it does, what it cannot do, and exactly how to use it in your
01:10own kitchen this week.
01:11No fuss, no padding, just the thing itself.
01:15Before I go further, for the folks who want all of this, every household method I have worked
01:21out, and the ones I have not gotten to yet, gathered in one place.
01:24My husband and I have put it together in a book over at EliasYoder.com.
01:30Now, let me tell you what is really going on, because once you see the simple sense of it,
01:35everything after makes plain sense, and you will never look at an ant on your counter the
01:40same way again.
01:41When you see ants crossing your counter in a thin, dark line, your eye tells you a story.
01:47It says, the problem is right here, these ants on this counter.
01:52So you do the natural thing.
01:54You wipe them away with a wet rag, or you reach under the sink for the spray, and you
01:59kill every ant you can see, and you feel you have won.
02:02And then the next morning you come down to start the coffee, and the line is back, marching
02:08the very same road.
02:09And you do it again, and it comes back again.
02:12And after a week of this, you begin to feel the ants are something close to magic, that
02:17they cannot be beaten.
02:18But they are not magic.
02:20The trouble is that the ants you see are not the colony, not even close.
02:24They are the errand runners, a few dozen, maybe a few hundred, sent out from the nest to find
02:30food and bring it home.
02:31The real household is hidden away where your eye never falls, under the doorstep, behind
02:37the wall, beneath the floorboards, out in the foundation.
02:40And in that hidden place sits the queen, and around her the young being raised, and the
02:46great mass of the colony that never once comes up to your counter.
02:50That is the colony.
02:51The ants on your counter are only its hands.
02:54So when you wipe them away, you have done nothing but tidy up.
02:58The hands you broke are replaced by mourning from the thousands waiting below.
03:02The thing you can see was never the real problem.
03:05The thing you cannot see is.
03:07And here is the whole turn of it, the thing the old folks understood and most people have
03:12forgotten.
03:13You do not win against a nest by fighting at the door.
03:16You will lose that fight every single day for the rest of your life.
03:21You win by sending something back inside, down to the part you cannot reach, carried by the
03:26very ants you were trying to crush.
03:28That something is a white mineral called borax.
03:31It is dug out of dried lake beds out in the western deserts, ground fine into a powder,
03:37and it has been in American homes for the better part of 100 years for laundry and for cleaning.
03:43The same plain box that softens wash water is the thing that empties an ant colony.
03:48There is nothing exotic about it, and nothing you need a license to buy.
03:52It is not a thing a chemist cooked up in a laboratory and put a patent on.
03:57It is a plain mineral, the same one that has been hauled out of the ground and used in
04:03homes for generations.
04:04And that plainness is the very reason, as you will see before we are through, that so
04:10few people will tell you about it.
04:12Here is why it works, and why it works in a way no spray ever can.
04:18When a worker ant finds your sweet bait, it does not fall over dead on the spot.
04:24That is the whole secret.
04:26A spray kills on contact.
04:28The ant touches it and dies right there on your counter, which feels like victory, but
04:34is exactly the failure I just described, because the nest goes on.
04:39Borax does the opposite.
04:41It works slow.
04:42It moves inside the ant quietly, over the better part of a day or two, doing its work from the
04:49inside without any outward sign.
04:52And in that day or two, the ant feels fine.
04:55And so the ant does exactly what the good Lord built it to do.
04:59It carries the sweet food back home.
05:02And once it is home, it shares.
05:04This is the part that matters.
05:07Ants feed one another mouth to mouth.
05:09The forager brings food in and passes it along, drop by drop, to the workers that stayed behind,
05:16to the ones tending the young, to the young themselves, and at the last, up the chain,
05:22to the queen.
05:23The food a single ant carries in gets spread through the whole household within hours.
05:29That sharing is the thing that holds an ant colony together and makes it strong.
05:34It is also, when the food is laced with borax, the thing that destroys it.
05:40The poison rides the food right down the chain you could never reach.
05:45The queen is fed it by her own daughters.
05:47Her egg-laying falters and then fails.
05:50And with no new young coming, the colony goes quiet from the middle outward, until the road
05:57on your counter has no one left to walk it.
06:00The ants that go on in this world are the ones that breed.
06:03And a queen who has been fed this does not breed.
06:07That is the end of that nest, not the hands of it, the heart of it.
06:11That is why patience is the whole secret of this method, and why the quick poisons fail.
06:18A spray is loud and fast and final.
06:21And it kills the wrong ants, the replaceable ones, the hands.
06:26Borax is quiet and slow and patient, and it lets the ant deliver the blow to the one part
06:32of the colony you could never have reached on your own.
06:35You are not fighting the ants.
06:37You are letting the ants undo themselves.
06:40Now I owe you the honest measure of what this does and does not reach, before you go and
06:46try it on the wrong trouble, and feel I steered you wrong.
06:50This is for ants, specifically the foraging ants that send runners into your kitchen and
06:56pantry hunting food, the little sugar ants, the pavement ants you find along the cracks
07:01of a walk, the odorous ones that give off a sharp smell when you crush them, and the big
07:07carpenter ants that chew into damp wood.
07:09All of these forage, and all of them share food the same way, so all of them are reached
07:15by this.
07:16It does not work the same on every crawling or flying thing that troubles a house.
07:21It is not your answer for a wasp nest up in the eve, nor for bed bugs in a mattress,
07:28nor
07:28for a mouse in the wall.
07:30Those are each a different trouble for a different day, and I will not pretend one bowl of sugar
07:35water solves them.
07:37It solves ants, and it solves them well.
07:40Let me get you straight to the doing of it, because it is about as simple as anything in
07:45a kitchen.
07:46You will want a box of borax, the plain laundry kind, sold under the old mule team name you
07:52have likely walked past a hundred times.
07:54It runs about four dollars at the grocery, the hardware store, or the pharmacy, and a single
08:00box will outlast this summer and several more besides.
08:04You want white sugar, which you already have.
08:07You want a little warm water.
08:09And you want a handful of cotton balls, or, failing that, a few small jar lids or bottle
08:15caps to pour the bait into.
08:17That is the entire list.
08:19Four dollars the first time, and pennies every time after.
08:24Here is the mixing, and the proportion is the one thing I need you to hold onto, so listen
08:29close.
08:30In a small clean bowl, you put one part borax to three parts sugar.
08:36One spoon of the powder, three spoons of sugar, three to one.
08:42Say it to yourself.
08:43The reason the proportion matters so much is this.
08:47The sugar is the invitation, and the borax is the work.
08:50And if you get greedy with the borax and put in too much, the ants taste that something
08:56is wrong with the food, and they will turn up their noses and refuse to carry it home.
09:00And you have wasted your evening.
09:03Put in too little, and there is not enough in each drop to do the job before the ant lives
09:08long enough to wander off.
09:10Three parts sugar to one part borax is the proportion that has held up through long use.
09:16The sweet spot where the ants take it gladly, and it still does its quiet work.
09:22Do not eyeball it loose, three to one.
09:26Add about a quarter cup of warm water to the bowl, and stir it slow and steady until the
09:31sugar and the borax have both melted away, and you are left with a clear syrup, about
09:36as thick as pancake batter.
09:38Warm water dissolves it better than cold, so warm it a touch if you can.
09:43When it is smooth and clear, with no grit settling at the bottom, it is ready.
09:48Take your cotton balls and soak them in the syrup until they are good and saturated, soft
09:54and heavy with it.
09:55The cotton holds the syrup and keeps it from drying out too fast, and it gives the ants
10:00something to crowd onto and feed from without drowning.
10:04Or, if you would rather, pour a little of the syrup into each of your jar lids, a thin pool,
10:09no more, so the ants can reach it and walk away again.
10:13Now, here is a thing the books do not always tell you.
10:17Some ants, in some seasons, do not want the sweet at all.
10:21They are after grease and protein instead, the way a body craves different things at different
10:26times of the year.
10:28If you set out your sugar syrup and the ants walk right past it, do not think the method
10:33failed.
10:33Switch your bait.
10:34Take a spoon of peanut butter, work in a small pinch of borax, far less than the peanut butter,
10:40just a quarter as much, and set little dabs of it where the ants travel, on a scrap of
10:45wax paper or in those same jar lids.
10:48Same idea exactly, only the carrier has changed from sweet to greasy.
10:53The borax does not care what it rides in on.
10:56It only needs the ant to eat it and carry it home.
10:59So, if the sugar fails, reach for the peanut butter before you give up on the whole business.
11:04Now, set your baits down right in the path of the ants.
11:07Not where you wish they would go, where they actually go.
11:11Along the baseboard where the line runs, under the cabinet, by the crack in the door frame
11:16where they file in, on the windowsill if that is their road.
11:20Get down low and follow the line back to where it comes in and set your bait close to
11:25that entry, because the nearer you put it to their road, the sooner they find it and the
11:30faster the whole thing gets moving.
11:32Put out more than one if you have more than one trail.
11:35There is no harm in three or four little stations around a busy kitchen.
11:39Put them where you have watched the ants travel.
11:42The closer to their highway, the faster they find it.
11:45And here is the hardest part of the whole business, and the part where most folks fail and then
11:50declare the method useless.
11:51Once your bait is down, you must not kill the ants you see.
11:55I know.
11:56Everything in you, watching that line thicken on your clean counter, will be screaming to
12:01wipe it away or reach for the spray.
12:03You must not.
12:05If you kill the runners, you have broken the very thing that was carrying your medicine
12:09home.
12:09You have cut the chain before it reached the queen.
12:12Leave them be.
12:13Let them feed.
12:15Let them carry it back down into the dark.
12:17Your patience for two days is the whole price of the thing working, and it is the cheapest
12:22price you will ever pay for anything.
12:24And I will tell you exactly what you are going to see in those two days, so it does not
12:28alarm
12:29you and make you give up too soon.
12:31You will see more ants, not fewer.
12:33For a day, sometimes two, the line on your counter will swell into a thick, busy, crowded road.
12:41Far more ants than you had before you set the bait out.
12:45This will look like the plan going badly wrong.
12:48It is the opposite.
12:49It means the runners found the food and went home and told the whole household where it
12:54is.
12:54And now the colony is sending everyone it has to carry the bounty home.
13:00And every one of them is carrying borax.
13:03That swarm is not your failure.
13:05It is the site of the thing working better than you hoped.
13:08So let them swarm, and let them work, and keep your hands off them.
13:13By the next morning, the thick line will have thinned.
13:17By the second or third day, it is a trickle of a few confused stragglers wandering without
13:22the steady road they followed before, because the colony behind them is coming apart.
13:28And then it is gone, the road empty, because there is no longer a household sending anyone
13:33out.
13:34Set out a little fresh bait once more after several days to catch any stragglers or a second
13:40nest you did not know about, and the work is finished.
13:43Now let me lay out for you, plain and even-handed, what is good about this way and what is
13:49not,
13:49because you ought to go in seeing both clearly, the way I would want it laid out for me.
13:55What is good about it is a good deal.
13:57It is cheap past arguing.
13:59Four dollars for a box that serves you for years, against the hundreds of dollars a service
14:04will charge for one visit.
14:06It reaches the part of the problem that actually matters, the queen and the nest, instead of
14:12only the hands of it on your counter, which is the one thing the quick methods cannot do.
14:17It works across most every ant that troubles a kitchen, because they all share food in that
14:23same chain, sweet feeders and grease feeders alike, once you match the bait to what they want.
14:28It uses things you very nearly have on hand already, sugar and water and a box of laundry powder.
14:35And as poisons go, it sits low on the scale of harm to people and animals,
14:41compared to the harsh chemical sprays a person might otherwise reach for,
14:45and lay down across the very counters they cut their bread on.
14:48It asks little of you but a clean bowl and two days of patience.
14:53And what is not good about it, told just as straight, because I will not sell you only
14:58the bright side.
14:59It is slow.
15:00There is no getting around that, and I will not pretend otherwise.
15:04If you want dead ants on the counter in the next 60 seconds, a spray will give you that
15:09and this will not.
15:10This gives you, for a day or two, more ants than you started with, and only then an empty
15:16nest.
15:17You are trading the quick satisfaction for the real result.
15:20And you have to be the sort of person who can wait two days for the better outcome.
15:25It is narrow.
15:26It is for foraging ants and nothing else.
15:29It will do nothing for your wasps or your mice or your bed bugs,
15:33and I would rather tell you that now than have you disappointed later.
15:37It wants a little patience in the matching too.
15:39If the ants are after grease that week, your sugar will sit untouched until you switch it.
15:44And though it is low in harm, it is not no harm.
15:48Borax is still a thing you do not want a small child eating, nor a curious dog or cat lapping
15:54up, and taken in a real quantity, it can make a body sick.
15:58That is why every bait you set goes up out of reach, tucked behind the stove, set back
16:03inside a cabinet, placed where only an ant the size of a grain of rice can crawl to it,
16:08and no little hand or paw can.
16:10And you wash your own hands well when you are done with the mixing.
16:14Treat it with the same plain respect you would give any strong cleaning powder under your sink,
16:19and it will give you no trouble at all.
16:21Now I would like you to sit with one thing for a moment,
16:24because to my mind, it is the heart of the whole matter.
16:27A $4 box of laundry powder does this work, and does it more completely, all the way down to the
16:34queen,
16:34than a man who comes to your door and charges you $200 and $300 for a single visit,
16:40and asks you to put your name to a paper that bills you again every season, spring and fall,
16:46for as long as you own your house.
16:48Ten years of that runs to $4 and $5,000 for a trouble a saucer of sugar water settles on
16:56the first night.
16:57So how can it be that the cheap thing on the laundry shelf is the better thing,
17:02and almost no one ever tells you so?
17:05The honest answer is the plainest one.
17:09There is no money in a box of powder a woman buys once and uses for years.
17:15There is very good money in a service paid for over and over, every quarter, forever.
17:22A nest killed once and for all is the single worst thing that can happen to a business built entirely
17:28on coming back next season.
17:30So a way of doing things that finishes the job in one night is not what such a business wants
17:36in your hands.
17:37The cheap powder was never taken off the shelf.
17:40It is right there this minute, $4, you can hold it in your hand within the hour.
17:46It simply, quietly, stopped being talked about.
17:51The advertisements are all for the sprays and the services, none of them for the plain box beside the soap.
17:57And so, generation by generation, folks stopped reaching for it.
18:03Not because anyone forbade it, but because nobody was left telling them it was there.
18:09I do not call that a conspiracy, because a conspiracy needs men in a room agreeing to deceive you,
18:15and that is not what this is.
18:17It is worse than a conspiracy in a way, and stranger.
18:21It is a system that nobody has to sit down and arrange, that simply earns its living off of you
18:28not knowing a thing,
18:29and therefore has not the smallest reason in the world to teach it to you.
18:34The knowing did not vanish because it failed.
18:37It vanished because it worked so plainly and so cheaply that there was no profit in keeping it alive.
18:44And profit, not truth, is mostly what gets remembered and what gets passed along, and what gets quietly let go.
18:53So here is what I would have you do this week, while it is fresh in your mind.
18:58Walk in and buy the $4 box of borax.
19:02Mix your one-part borax to three-part sugar with a little warm water, just the way I gave it
19:08to you.
19:09Soak your cotton balls, set them down where the line truly marches, and then do the hard and patient thing.
19:16Leave the ants be, and let them carry it home into the dark.
19:20And if they will not take the sweet, reach for the peanut butter and try again.
19:26Then come back down here to the comments and tell me how it went, and how many days your line
19:31took to go quiet.
19:32And while you are at it, I would dearly like to know, tell me what county you live in and
19:38how old your house is.
19:40The older houses have the old ant roads worn deep into them, and I am forever learning which troubles tend
19:47to go with which sort of home.
19:49I read every one of them.
19:51And next time, since we have been talking all about the ants that come hunting for the sweet things you
19:56leave open,
19:57I am going to take you out to the pantry and show you the way we keep the flour and
20:02the corn meal and the dried beans through a whole year,
20:05all the way to next harvest, without a single weevil or pantry moth getting into so much as one jar
20:12of it.
20:13No chemicals on the food you eat, just a few plain things any one of you can set right this
20:19week.
20:19The ants come for what is left open.
20:22Next time, we close the pantry up tight the old way.
20:26This is the first debate where you have to try anything like this.
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