Not too long ago I opened the cabinet under the kitchen sink to find a terrible surprise. Ants! They were everywhere. By the evening, they’d made their way to the kitchen counter and were all over the baguette I’d just bought. Angry and frustrated (my husband would also add hysterical), I sent my husband out to find some ant bait while I cooked dinner. About an hour later he returned empty handed. “I couldn’t find anything,” he said and returned to practicing the harmonica.

I took everything out from under the kitchen sink and wiped down the shelves thoroughly. I cleaned the counters very well and put every item of food in the refrigerator to keep it out of reach of the ants. Then I did some research online about how to made my own ant bait. Every ant bait recipe I found called for borax.

Borax has always been a magical and elusive natural cleaning product to me. I often read about the wonders of borax in everyday cleaning but never knew where to get it. I’ve recently discovered that if you live in the UK you can buy borax at Boots.

Now that I had some borax I could make my homemade ant bait.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup confectioner’s sugar
• 1 tablespoon borax

Mix the ingredients together well and sprinkle in the area where you’ve seen ants. Keep it away from children and pets. It is poisonous. The ants will happily take this sweet poison back to their queen, killing her and the entire colony.

I honestly don’t know how well this works because my ants never returned after I cleaned the area. I put bait down anyway hoping something would happen, but it just lays there under the sink untouched.

I read somewhere else that if you clean the area where you’ve seen the ants with a mixture of half vinegar and half water, it gets rid of their chemical trails and they won’t return. Apparently, that’s true, because I still haven’t seen any ants since it cleaned. I really wanted to see if the ant bait worked though.

Photo by jurvetson.