Hello,
Anyone know how to get rid of ants in the car? I live in the city so this one is a total mystery to me.
Hmm well there are many types of black ants…Are these the small kind that you can’t even see until you look closely or are these the half inch long big guys? Both are attracted to sweets, but more importantly water. Ants can live for days without foods but cannot last more than a day without water. So I suspect your interior has a food source of water or food. Clean and vacuum the interior thoroghly and then lay some indoor ant traps around the floor of the car for a week. This should take care of them.
Take an empty, well-rinsed tuna can, and fill it half way with 20 Mule Team Borax. Sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of sugar on top of the Borax. The sugar will attract the ants, they will consume some of the Borax, and they will be dead within hours.
Unfortunately, I have some experience battling a variety of ants but primarily carpenter ants. They are very resilient which explains why they have survived for so long. They consume both protiens and sugars. If they are exploiting a protien food source, they may just walk right past a sugar based food and visa versa. I use both types of poison to keep them at bay. If you watch them, you can see when they are eating out of the sugar food stations versus eating the protien based poison scattered about. Anyway, you definitely want to use a poison that will be carried back to the nest and stored so the entire nest is killed. Killing just the scouts and foraging ants can acually cause a population explosion as they are quickly replaced and then some. Boric acid powder is a very effective control. I suggest adding water to make a slurry and using the right ratio of water, powder and sugar so the ants do not die before they can deliver the bad groceries to the rest of the nest. The formula I have always used is 2 tbls of powder, 2 cups sugar and a cup of water.
I’ve had ants living in everything from my log home to landscaping timbers, trees, sidewalk cracks, my cars and even the railings of a canoe I had stored behind the garage. The sun got so hot on the railings, you could hardly hold your hand on it but there were thousands of them living in there. Amazingly tough little buggers. They may be entering the car to forage but they could just be living in some tight space too. Often, they establish satellite colonies extending out from the “original” nest. When you see one colony, likely there are others nearby.
If your own efforts to get rid of the ants have not succeeded after a month, hire a professional exterminator. They are not just a nuisance. Some kinds of ants (e.g. carpenter) can be very destructive.
Use ant traps, the little flat cans.