Today, I noticed an ant in the kitchen, didn't think anything of it. Come back tonight to see a couple more. Didn't think about that any more either. Just went downstairs and there's about 20 of them on the worktop and I have not got a clue where they've come from! Anyone got an idea or something to get rid of the vermin?!

Baking Powder. Very effective. Makes them burst and then they go away.

Do you remember all the ants in the SU the other week Chris where my team were sitting? Errgh yuck

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww that was GROSS!!!!!!!!

imagine being a bagpipe player and having ants discover your instrument? (I understand the bag bit of bagpipes used to be conditioned with treacle...)

There are loooads of ant repellents on the market.

That might be useful if you needed to sweeten up your porage

I had a go at playing bagpipes once. I found it really difficult to unco-ordinate my breathing with the notes. How do they phrase the music given that the music is sort of continuous?

Maybe that's why they have such fast twiddles and grace notes all the time, to try hide the fact that they're actually just droning on....

I guess they eat it, then it fizzes up inside them and they burst. Is it ok for putting on the eath of plant pots, where ants seem to have taken up residence amongst the roots of a rather precious but small palm tree?? I've tried many of the products on sale, but they seem to have a developed and immunity to it!!

I wonder what would happen if you put baking powder into an ant-infested set of bagpipes?
*has visions of them bursting forth from every orifice the pipes possess*

Oh that is a wonderful image...the massed pipes of the Coldstream Guards just revving up to do Amazing Grace and all exploding in turn. Monty Python would have loved it!

Try tempting them into a container with sugar, then putting them somewhere where they will stay, for example a feild.

*has image of a load of bagpipes being tempted by sugar and being put in a field*

*Slaps Janexxx with a wet fish, causing her to realise that is a silly image to have.*
*Has an image of a mount Everest made of Sugar.*

*Sadly, the wet fish has eaten not-so-magic mushrooms, flaps over, transmogrifies into a bagpipe, realises that the bagpipe has perfect pitch and therefore cannot exist, since the octave is always totally flat, and disappears into a puff of CO2, which curiously enough, happens to be the gas which exploded the ants in the first place.*

But the ants are back! well at least there are a few around crawling around my floors!

I often marvel when I look at an ant colony how well they work together. A bit like a symphony orchestra, each one has its place in life, and when they all work together well, the community functions perfectly. The queen ant or course, is the conductor.

So before you put baking powder on them, just think you might have destroyed one of the violin section.

Ants are very intriguing. When forraging for food, they deposit pheromone trails along the path they take to try and find food. With no pheromone around, each ant chooses a different path; with pheromone on the ground, they follow the strongest pheromone trail they can see.

Here's the clever bit: the ants that have the shorter paths to the food travel between the nest and the food more times per minute than the other ants who are taking a longer route. This means that the shorter paths get more pheromone deposited on them: the ants using them are going back and forth over them. As mentioned before, the ants follow the strongest pheromones, so as soon as extra pheromone has been deposited on a path to the food, more and more ants will start choosing that way to go. After a while, all the ants will be going along the shortest path to the food: that path gets more and more pheromone, unlike the longer paths, which are less used.

What a bit like learning a piece of music properly, each player improves by following the examples of others until they get it right and it sound good.

So...Are the ants gone now?

Exactly, rote learning as applied to music.

Yes, individual ants have very little intelligence so they do everything by trial and error. The only thing they know is when they've succeeded (e.g. they're at the food). The colony on the whole, however, can appear to exhibit intelligent behaviour: with 1000 ants doing trial and error to find the food, one of them is bound to find it sooner or later.

Thinking about how to do this with musicians: it's like working out the fingering for a note on recorder with no prior knowledge of fingering. There are however many combinations of holes being open, closed, half-closed etc. A group of recorder players could each sit there trying out different fingerings; when someone finds a combination of fingers that work, they tell some other people, and eventually everyone can play the note .

Very interesting

This thread has been fascinating, if a little gross....

Commercial ant repellants are generally made of the sort of stuff you wouldn't choose to have around your home. They are simply looking for food so if you can work out where they are coming in, put a spoonful of jam or marmalade just outside. They'll soon find it, and stay outside. Our ants by the front door have a spoonful of marmalade each morning, and I never see one inside. They seem happy with cheapo Tesco marmalade, no need to give them anything fancy . . .

The trouble with this is they will take the food back to their colony, the colony will thrive and this eventually exacerbates the problem. It only works by keeping the ants in one place instead of them wandering round the house and getting in your hair!

What you could do is after many ants have accumulated around the marmalade, just pour soapy water on all of them to kill them.

Try this if you really need to get rid.

In Germany it is illegal to kill ants and it carries a fine. Hmmm ... I wonder, just imagine, while strolling in a Berlin park, admiring the Brandenburg Gate and lost in thought about the wonders of Bach and Beethoven, Sir Simon Rattle inadvertently treads on a poor innocent ant, in full view of the German Police. He is hauled off to the German Police Station and there charged with the offence of formicide. The grim evidence is still there on the sole of his shoe, he can't plead innocence.

He pays the fine and does his community service (re-homing orphaned ants probably) and then sent back to Blighty in disgrace, his passport marked, never to be allowed back again. The BPO left conductorless. Oh dear!!

sounds rather like the technique I used to learn the recorder, only on my own....

But we don't want to kill them! They are as much as part of the wildlife of our garden as the butterflies, moths, numerous birds, bats, hedgehogs, etc, etc, etc. I don't begrudge them a spoonful of marmalade . . . After all, we buy food for the birds and the hedgehogs.

The ants in our house have been acting very oddly. I keep expecting, given the amount of scouting behaviour to have an invasion, but they're not interested. Perhaps I keep my kitchen cleaner than my husband thinks

I'm terrified of ants! grr.

All right then - maybe you should get one of those ant colony display case things...

I think they're quite content with the flower bed outside the front door.

I find that if myou put all food in Ant-proof containers, they can't bother you, I had ant problems when I was on holiday in Spain, I dropped a lolly in my hotel room, and the place was crawling with ants thereafter, but when I put it in my lunch bow (Air tight) they just, went...