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It starts with one. A single ant crossing your kitchen counter, and you brush it away and think nothing of it. But that one was a scout, and he has found your kitchen good, and gone back to tell the others. By tomorrow there is a marching column streaming in from some crack you cannot find, and no matter how many you wipe away, more come. Folks spend good money on the sprays and the exterminators and still the ants come back. But here is the thing the old people understood that most folks miss, and it is the whole key to winning: killing the ants you see does almost nothing, for the trouble is not the ants on your counter, it is the nest you cannot see. In this video I show you five old ways to get rid of ants for good, by dealing with the real problem and not just the ants in front of you.
I am Elias, and I keep up this Lancaster County place the old plain way, and out here, close to the fields, the ants will come into a house every summer if you let them. My grandmother fought them every year and taught me how, with a few cheap things and a bit of patience, and I have never once had t
https://eliasyoder.com
It starts with one. A single ant crossing your kitchen counter, and you brush it away and think nothing of it. But that one was a scout, and he has found your kitchen good, and gone back to tell the others. By tomorrow there is a marching column streaming in from some crack you cannot find, and no matter how many you wipe away, more come. Folks spend good money on the sprays and the exterminators and still the ants come back. But here is the thing the old people understood that most folks miss, and it is the whole key to winning: killing the ants you see does almost nothing, for the trouble is not the ants on your counter, it is the nest you cannot see. In this video I show you five old ways to get rid of ants for good, by dealing with the real problem and not just the ants in front of you.
I am Elias, and I keep up this Lancaster County place the old plain way, and out here, close to the fields, the ants will come into a house every summer if you let them. My grandmother fought them every year and taught me how, with a few cheap things and a bit of patience, and I have never once had t
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00:00It starts with one. You see a single ant crossing your kitchen counter and you think little of it
00:06and you brush it away. But that one ant was a scout and he has found your kitchen good and
00:13he
00:13has gone back to tell the others. And by tomorrow there is a line of them, a marching column
00:19streaming in from some crack you cannot find, straight to the sugar or the crumbs or the sticky
00:26spot by the stove and no matter how many you wipe away, more come. It is one of the most
00:33maddening troubles in a house and folks spend good money on the sprays and the exterminators
00:39fighting it and still the ants come back. But here is the thing the old people understood
00:45that most folks miss and it is the whole key to truly winning. Killing the ants you see does
00:53almost nothing. For the trouble is not the ants on your counter, it is the nest you cannot
01:00see. Today I am going to show you five old ways to get rid of ants for good, by dealing
01:07with the real problem and not just the ants you see. I am Elias and I keep up this Lancaster
01:15County place the old plain way and out here, close to the fields and the soil, the ants
01:21will come into a house every summer if you let them. My grandmother fought them every
01:27year and taught me how, with a few cheap things and a bit of patience, and I have never once
01:33had to call a man with a sprayer. Now the great secret, before I give you the five ways, is
01:41this. An ant you see is one of thousands you do not, for they live in a great colony in
01:48the
01:48ground with a queen laying eggs, and as long as that colony and that queen live, they will
01:55keep sending out more, no matter how many you kill in the kitchen. So the whole aim of everything
02:02I will show you is either to keep them out, or reach past the ants you see and destroy the
02:08colony itself. Kill the colony, and the trouble ends. Kill only the ants on the counter, and it
02:16never does. Keep that in your mind through all five.
02:22Quick word before I go further. The old methods my family uses, there is more of it than fits
02:29in any one video. I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com. The book is the
02:37long version. If you want it, it is there. I will not mention it again. I remember my grandmother's
02:45war with the ants as if it were a season of the year, for every summer they would come,
02:51up through some crack by the old stone foundation, marching for the pantry. And I remember she
02:58never once panicked, nor reached for anything harsh. She would watch them a while, tracing
03:04where they came and went with her eye. And then she would set her little dishes of sweet
03:10borax bait along their road, and wipe her counters till there was not a crumb, and within the week
03:17the marching line thinned and dwindled and was gone. She used to say to me, Do not fight the ants
03:25you can see, Elias. Find the ones you cannot. It puzzled me as a boy, but I came to understand
03:32it was the whole of the matter. She was not fighting the ants on the counter at all. She was
03:39reaching through them to the nest in the ground. That patient, knowing way of hers is what I want
03:46to hand you now, for it works where all the frantic swatting and spraying never will. The first way,
03:54and it is the foundation of all the rest, is to give them nothing to come for. For an ant
04:01comes
04:01into your house for one reason, food, and most of all, the sweet and the sticky. That scout I spoke
04:09of, he is searching for food, and if he finds none, he goes home, and no column follows. But if
04:17he finds
04:18so much as the sugar dried on the lip of a soda can, or a few crumbs, or a sticky
04:24ring where the
04:24honey jar sat, that is enough. He carries the news home, and the army comes. So the first and greatest
04:33defense is plain cleanliness, giving them nothing to find. You keep your counters wiped clean of crumbs
04:41and sticky spots. You keep your sugar and your sweet things in tight, closed jars they cannot get
04:47into. You do not leave food sitting out. And here is one folks forget. You rinse your cans and bottles
04:55before you set them by. For the little bit of sweet soda or juice left in a can is a
05:02feast to an ant
05:03and draws them straight to your bin. Deny them the food, and you have solved half your ant trouble
05:09before you do another thing. For ants will not keep coming to a place that feeds them nothing.
05:16This is the old wisdom. Keep a clean kitchen and a tight pantry, and you give the ants no reason
05:23to
05:24come at all. Mind the small hidden sources too, the crumbs down in the toaster, the grease behind the
05:31stove, the drip under the honey jar, the pet's food dish left full on the floor overnight, the sticky
05:39spill dried in a cupboard. For the ants find these where we overlook them. Wipe up spills at once
05:47while they are fresh. Sweep the crumbs. Keep the sweet things sealed tight in glass or metal the ants
05:55cannot enter. And take the pet food up between meals. A house that offers an ant nothing is a house
06:02the ants
06:03soon give up on, for they are practical creatures and will not waste their labor on a barren place.
06:10This one habit of plain cleanliness, kept faithfully, prevents more ant trouble than all the sprays ever
06:19sold. The second way is for when they are already coming, and it is the best of all the ways
06:25to reach
06:26the colony you cannot see, and that is a borax bait. Now I have spoken of borax before, that old
06:34white
06:34mineral powder you buy cheap in the laundry aisle, and here is its finest use. You cannot follow every
06:42ant home to its nest, but you can let the ants carry your bait home for you, and this is
06:49the clever
06:50heart of it. You make a sweet bait mixed with a little borax, and you set it where the ants
06:56can
06:56find it. The ants, drawn by the sweet, eat it and carry it back to the colony and feed it
07:03to the others
07:03and to the queen, and the borax, slow and quiet, does its work through the whole nest. That is why
07:11it works
07:12where killing the ones you see does not. It reaches the colony through the ants themselves. Here is how you
07:19make it. You take three spoons of sugar and one spoon of borax, and mind that measure, three of sugar
07:28to one
07:28of borax, for the sugar is what draws them and you want plenty of it, and only a little borax,
07:36because if
07:36you put too much borax, the bait works too fast and too strong, killing the ants before they can carry
07:44it
07:44home, and then it does not reach the colony at all. So three sweet to one borax. You mix in
07:52just enough
07:53warm water to make it into a syrup, about the thickness of maple syrup, stirring it smooth. Then you soak
08:00it
08:00onto some cotton, or put it in little shallow containers with holes for the ants to get in, and you
08:07set these
08:08where you have seen the ants traveling. Now the safety of it, and I will always tell you the safety
08:14plain,
08:15for it builds the trust between us. Borax is not something to be eaten, not by a child, nor a
08:23pet,
08:23nor anyone. And though it is a common cheap household thing, it is not to be taken inside the body.
08:30So when you
08:31set these baits, you set them where no child and no animal can get at them, up out of reach,
08:38or closed
08:38in containers with only small holes the ants can enter, well away from where little ones or the dog
08:45or cat might find them and taste the sweet. Label them if there is any doubt. Kept away from the
08:53children
08:53and the pets, the borax bait is one of the finest and cheapest ant remedies there is, but that safety
09:00is not to be
09:01skipped. And you must be patient with it, for it is meant to be slow. That is the whole point.
09:08You want the
09:08ants coming and going freely, carrying it home over a few days. So do not be discouraged to see ants
09:16still
09:16at the bait. That is it working. Give it a few days and you will see the whole trouble dwindle
09:23away as the
09:24colony dies from within. A few practical notes on the placing of it. You set the baits right along the
09:30trails
09:31where the ants are already traveling, and near where they come in, so they find them quick and you can
09:37set
09:37several about rather than just one. Do not clean away the ants' trails while the bait is working, for you
09:44want them following their roads right to it and back home again. So leave the trails be until the colony
09:50is dead.
09:50And if you find the ants are ignoring your bait, it is most often one of two things. Either there
09:57is too
09:57much borax and it is putting them off, so make a fresh, sweeter batch with less borax, or there is
10:04other
10:04food about drawing them instead, so clean better and take away their other choices so your bait is the
10:11sweetest thing they can find. And you may try a bit of a different bait for different ants, for some
10:17ants want the
10:18sweet and some in certain seasons want grease or fat, so if a sweet bait fails, you can try mixing
10:25the borax into
10:26a little grease or peanut butter instead. Patience and a little adjusting and the bait will clear them.
10:33The third way is to go after the colony directly, when you can find it, for if you can find
10:39where they are
10:39nesting, you can end the whole thing at the source. Now often the nest is outside, in the yard or
10:46by the
10:46foundation, and the ants are traveling in through a crack. To find it, you follow them home. If there is
10:53a
10:53line of ants, you simply follow it, slow and patient, back the way they came, out to where they are
11:00disappearing into the ground or the wall, and there is your colony. If you have trouble seeing which way a
11:06lone ant is headed, a little spray of vinegar near it will usually turn it back toward home, and you
11:12can
11:12follow it from there. Once you have found the nest, an access hole in the ground, or a spot in
11:18the soil
11:19where they stream in and out, you have a few plain old ways to destroy it. The gentlest is plain
11:26water,
11:26and a great deal of it. You run your garden hose to the nest and let it flood the ground
11:31there a good
11:32ten minutes, soaking the soil deep, drowning and driving out the colony, and you do this each day
11:39until you see no more activity. It harms nothing in your yard, no poison at all, just water, and done
11:46faithfully day after day, it drives the colony out or destroys it. That is the safest way, if a slow
11:53one.
11:53Now there is a stronger way, and it is boiling water, an old and effective method, but one that wants
12:00real care, so heed the safety here. You boil a good pot of water on the stove, and you can
12:06make it stronger
12:07by mixing in a good deal of cayenne pepper, or vinegar if you have no cayenne, though the boiling
12:13water is the main of it. Then, and this is where the care comes, you carry that pot of boiling
12:19water out
12:20to the nest, and boiling water is a dangerous thing to carry, so you wear oven mitts, you have someone
12:26open the doors for you so your hands stay on the pot, and you go slow and careful, for a
12:32slip and a splash
12:33of boiling water is a bad scald. You pour it slow into the nest holes and where you see the
12:39ants, and the boiling
12:41water kills them on contact and washes down into the nest. Mind you keep it off the garden plants you
12:47want
12:47to keep, for boiling water will kill whatever it touches, and mind above all your own safety carrying it.
12:54Done carefully, a pot or two of boiling water into the nest holes is a swift and cheap end to
13:01a colony.
13:02The fourth way is a clever old trick for protecting a table of food out of doors, at a picnic
13:07or a gathering,
13:09from the ants that would swarm it, and it is the picnic moat. Ants cannot cross water, so you make
13:15a little water barrier
13:16they cannot pass. You take four containers, tins or dishes or cups, and you set each leg of your table
13:24down into one, and you fill each with a little water. Now the only way up to your food is
13:30up those legs,
13:31and the legs stand in water the ants cannot cross, so they are stopped cold at the bottom and cannot
13:37reach the table at all.
13:38Your food sits safe on its little island. It is a simple, harmless, clever thing, and it saves many a
13:46picnic
13:46or an outdoor meal from being overrun. You can do the same to protect anything standing on legs that you
13:53want
13:53to keep the ants off. A pet's food dish, a table, a stand. Set its feet in water, and the
14:00ants cannot climb to it.
14:01It is a fine trick for a pet's food bowl especially, which draws the ants so. For set the bowl
14:08inside a shallow
14:09dish of water, and the food stays clean of them. And there are dry barriers that work on the same
14:16idea
14:16indoors. A line of a thing the ants will not cross laid across their path. A chalk line, a line
14:24of cinnamon,
14:24of ground pepper, of that soft white mineral earth folks call diatomaceous earth, any of which an ant is loath
14:33to cross,
14:34drawn across a threshold or a window sill where they enter. It is not so sure as the water moat,
14:41but it will turn many of them and is worth a try across a doorway they favor.
14:46The fifth way is the finishing step, the one that keeps them from coming back after you have dealt with
14:52them,
14:53and it is erasing their trail. For here is a thing about ants you must understand. When an ant travels,
15:01he lays down a scent behind him, an invisible trail, so that the others can follow the same path to
15:08the food.
15:09That is why they march in a line. They are all following the scent trail the first ones laid.
15:15So even after you have baited and destroyed the colony, if you leave those scent trails in your house,
15:21they act as a map leading any new ants straight along the old paths. So you wipe them out.
15:28You take that same vinegar and water, half and half, with a few drops of dish soap in it, in
15:35a spray bottle,
15:36and you wipe down all the places the ants were traveling. The baseboards, the counters, the window sills,
15:43the door frames, the cracks they came through, washing away the scent trail so there is no map left to
15:50follow.
15:51The vinegar cuts the scent and erases the path. This is why, when you wipe an ant trail with plain
15:58water,
15:58the ants often come right back along the same line, for the water does not truly break the scent,
16:04but the vinegar does, cutting it so the followers lose the road. Get right down into the cracks
16:11and along the baseboards and around the door and window frames where they entered,
16:16for that is where the scent is laid thickest. And once you have wiped the trails
16:21and closed up the cracks they used with a bit of caulk or filling where you can,
16:26you have not only killed the colony, but shut and erased the road,
16:31so that even a new scout finds no easy way in and no trail to follow.
16:37That is how you make it last, rather than fighting the same ants up the same crack every summer.
16:43Do this after you have dealt with the colony, not before,
16:47for you want the ants freely carrying your bait home first, but once the colony is done,
16:53erase every trail and you close the door behind them. And a plain safety word,
17:00that vinegar spray is all you need, but never you mix vinegar with bleach thinking to make it stronger,
17:06for the two together make a dangerous gas. The plain vinegar and water does the job.
17:13So let me say a small plain word about the fighting of ants, not a who-profits sermon,
17:19for the ant is no one's scheme, only a plain trouble of summer. But there is a lesson in it.
17:26Folks spend a great deal on the sprays that kill the ants they see, and on the men who come
17:31to spray,
17:32and much of that money is wasted, because killing the ants you see is the one thing that does not
17:38solve the trouble.
17:39The spray kills the scouts on the counter, and you feel you have done something,
17:44but the colony sits untouched in the ground sending out more, and back they come, and you buy more spray.
17:51The old cheap way, the bait carried home and the colony destroyed at its source, actually ends the trouble.
17:58But it is patient and quiet, and sells nobody a bottle.
18:02So the quick spray that does not truly work gets sold and sold, and the slow, cheap way that does
18:09work gets forgotten,
18:11not by anyone's scheme, just by the plain way the money runs.
18:15The old people had no exterminator to call.
18:18They ended their ant troubles with sugar and borax and boiling water and patience, and so can you.
18:26So there are the five old ways to be rid of ants for good.
18:30First, give them nothing.
18:32Keep a clean kitchen and a tight pantry, and rinse your cans, so no scout ever brings the army.
18:39Second, set the borax and sugar bait, kept safe from children and pets,
18:44and let the ants carry it home to kill the colony from within.
18:48Third, find the nest by following them home, and destroy it with flooding water, or, carefully, with boiling water.
18:58Fourth, set your outdoor table legs in water to make a moat they cannot cross.
19:04And fifth, erase their scent trails with vinegar and water, so none can follow the old paths back.
19:11Do these in patience, and you will not just scatter the ants you see, you will end the trouble at
19:18its root,
19:18cheaply and cleanly, the way the old people did.
19:23Now I want to hear from you.
19:24Tell me down below what sort of ants trouble you,
19:27the little sugar ants in the kitchen, or the big ones,
19:31and whether you have tried the borax bait, and how it went.
19:34And tell me your county and the age of your house,
19:38for the old houses with their many cracks let the ants in far easier than the tight new ones,
19:44and I like to know where you all write from.
19:46I read every one.
19:48Next time, I want to show you the many old uses for baking soda about the house,
19:54that other cheap white powder that sits in near every kitchen,
19:58for like the vinegar, it does a dozen jobs most folks never think of,
20:02from the cleaning, to the freshening, to a few tricks that will surprise you.
20:07The old people kept the ants and the pests out of their homes with a few cheap things,
20:13and a great deal of patience, and the knowing of how the creatures live,
20:17reaching past the trouble they could see, to the root they could not.
20:21There is a quiet wisdom in solving a thing at its source,
20:25rather than swatting forever at what it throws up in front of you.
20:28The people who built this country with their hands knew that,
20:32and we are only just starting to remember it.
20:35The people who wrote this country without a great idea of this country,
20:35at the university of the U.S.