Is ant stational bait harmful to Chins?

[renRaining]

I recently moved to a new house. After moving in, I constantly find ants crawling on the floor, sometimes in the cages. I clean all cages at least twice weekly and keep the home pretty clean and neat. I am going to try "Amdro Kills Ants Stations". The main chemical components of the bait is Hydramethylnon. Is it toxic or harmful to the chins? If so, is there any alternatives? Thanks for input. =)

 

[InkedupTara]

If it isnt a spray and they cant come in direct contact, it should be ok. Just keep them out of the chin room and wash your hands really well when you are done handling the trap.

 

[Spoof]

It won't bother the chins. I also recommend getting one of those boundary sprays from Lowes and spraying around the outside of the house. They work really well.

If you're seeing the big black ants, that's bad and you'll want to get an exterminator to see how bad they've chewed up the walls of your house.

If it's the little black sugar ones, no worries. That boundary spray will take care of them.

 

[renRaining]

Thanks!
I tried two kind of station bait. Neither works, so I got the boundary spray "home defense" from home depot. It works very well!! Finally, no more ants sneak around in the house and around chin's cages.

 

[tunes]

Salt works great too and isn't so harmful to the environment. Just sprinkle salt all around your house. It keeps spiders and other creepy crawlies out as well. Around the cage itself, as long as your chins can't snack on it, you can make a paste out of cinnamon and put it down. Ants won't cross that either.

 

[halfstache]

renRaining, I'm glad your seeing some results from the home defense, but my assumption is that it will be a short lived result. Bifenthrin, the active ingredient in home defense is not the greatest product for ants. Bifenthrin is what we use in our power sprayers for doing pest control work, and it does a great job and kills a whole lot of critters, but ants usually put up a pretty good fight against it unless you can find where they are nesting and do a drench treatment. For ants in the house I would really need to know what type of ants you are seeing and then I could tell you what products to use. Some ants, especially odorous house ants, are repelled by things such as home defense and they will simply move to another area of the house and you can chase them from room to room. Let me ask a couple questions first and then I should be able to narrow down a treatment.

1. What color are the ants? black only, black and red, or red only?
2. do they seem extra small (flea sized or close to it), medium (slightly larger, but smaller than a dry grain of rice), or extra large sized (as big or bigger than a dry grain of rice)?
3. This is kind of gross, but its incredibly important, if you smash some of the ants with a finger and then smell them do they have a foul odor? If so it may smell like rotten bananas or coconut. If no odor, that is important too.

 

[renRaining]

Jeremiah, I have read your comments on a pests control post. Home Defense only give me one-wk-ant-free home. The type ants I found at my home is medium size black ants with no odor. I believe there are two colonies, one under a big tree and one is underground.

 

[halfstache]

ok, more than likely then you are dealing with argentine ants, which is a good thing because they are some of the easier ones to deal with. If you have found where they have their nest sites at outside then you should be able to do a drench treatment for them. You can take one of those one gallon bottles of home defense and pour the entire gallon directly onto the ant mound and let it soak into the ground. Do that for each mound and it will wipe them out. I've never had a colony resurface after a treatment like that. Actually I would just order some Bifen IT from domyownpestcontrol.com its about 23 bucks for a pint of it, and that is enough to make 16 of those bottles of home defense... anyhow if you go that route instead make sure to read the label, it'd be one ounce per gallon of water and pour it straight onto the ant mound (so long as its outside, don't do a drench in the house.. that would be a disaster )