Make Your Own Pesticide-Free Ant Trap

If ants in your yard or garden—or even worse your home—are giving you a hard time, but you're not keen on the idea of spraying pesticides all over the place, this no-poison ant trap may do the trick. It's based on the same principle behind our famous fruit fly trap, it just uses sugar instead of vinegar as the bait to lure the ants to their doom. Here's how it works.

Instructables user tgferreira posted this DIY project, and uses it in his yard to keep the ant population down. He got an old jar with a wide mouth, a short length of pipe that fit nicely inside of the jar, a pair of screw-top plastic bottle caps, some teflon plumber's tape, some water, sugar, and dish detergent. He attached a lid to either side of the pipe (but you could use anything that would stand up in the jar and keep the sugar above the water level), and added the sugar to the lid on top, facing up and to the mouth of the jar.

He then wrapped the whole pipe in teflon tape so the ants couldn't just crawl up the pipe to the sugar. Add a little water to the bottom of the jar, a few drops of dish detergent to break the surface tension, and you have an almost perpetual ant trap that lures them in but won't let them check back out.

We imagine it would work just as well indoors, but part of the trick here is that he dug a hole in his yard that was just the right size for the jar, so the ants just crawled to the edge of the dirt, into the jar, and down to their doom. It's a lot of trouble, but it might be worthwhile if you're trying to spot treat an ant problem. Otherwise though, there's always diatomaceous earth, which works pretty well against ants too. Have you dealt with an ant problem successfully? Have an idea to improve on the design? Let's hear it in the comments.

No Poison Ant Trap | Instructables