Ants in the Pantry

Just in case moving isn't enough of a hassle, we're getting to do parts of it twice. After we'd cleaned the pantry and put away a whole bunch of food, we discovered that we have ants.

These appear to be pharaoh ants, which may be the worst kind of ants to have. They could be thief ants, but you tell them apart by counting the number of segments in their antennae. These things are so small that if they weren't moving, you couldn't tell they're ants. So even finding antennae is a little bit challenging. Either kind of ant is really, really bad to have.

These ants can be difficult to eliminate. Pharaoh ants have multiple queens in a colony, so spraying insecticides just encourages them to scatter. Since they're in my pantry, which is where we keep food and lock up the dogs (once the food is safely in the cabinets), I don't especially want to use poison. But I'd read that a borax-sugar mix would do the job, so I tried that - a mound of borax and sugar, right in the middle of their path.

They tunneled through it.

I almost hate to kill something that sneaky and persistent. But when they're not eating your food, they eat silk, so that "almost" isn't enough to hold me back.