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Thanks all who responded especially the great advice from CRHomebuilder. We’ve decided to use the almendro only in the second floor master bedroom and tile the rest of the house. BTW the almendro is imported from Nicaragua as it is no longer harvested in CR. Thanks too to Scott for maintaining this very useful forum.
I too have been searching for food grade Diatomaceous Earth since I’ve been battling ants that have invaded my house, particularly so since the start of the rainy season. I live outside of Quepos on a finca. Both my husband and myself are reluctant to use pesticides as we have a dog and cat and want to keep our fruit & nut trees pesticide-free. I’ve come across this solution on the internet which worked within a day or two for ants inside the house:
“Boric acid: Mix 1 cup of sugar, 4 teaspoons of boric acid and 24 ounces of water in a glass screw top jar. Shake thoroughly until you can see that all the crystals are dissolved. Now put 1 cup of this mixture into a smaller jar which you have filled halfway with loose cotton. Firmly screw the lid back on, seal around the band with weatherproof tape and using an awl punch a few small holes in the center of the lid. Put this near the entrance of the nest or wherever they have made a path to your house. The key is the ants will get into the jar to eat the sugar and return to the nest and pass it on to the rest of the colony. If you find many dead ants by the jar dilute the solution and try again. With a proper mixture the colony may be destroyed in a few weeks. It does take the destruction of the queen to completely eradicate a colony. Keep this away from kids and pets!”
The reason for the cotton wad is to prevent the ants from drowning thereby allowing them to return to the colony and kill off the queen. I just filled a few small baby food jars with (holes punched on the lids to keep the pets out) with the liquid/cotton solution and by the next day ALL the ants were gone.This worked on the large carpenter ants that were hiding in the woodwork and made nocturnal appearances, mid-size black ants that were always on the floor and the tiny ants that had invaded our cupboards. One more thing, peppermint extract on the cupboard keeps those little cupboard ants away.
You can easily buy boric acid in a pharmacy, and as I understand it, it is only mildly poisonous to humans. In fact, it is used as an eyewash. I don’t know if this solution will work on outdoor ants or how environmentally harmful this approach is. I figure, outside is their territory so I leave them alone. Anyway, good luck.
