Bob NH said:
A lot of the stuff you get is highly diluted and very expensive on an "active ingredient" basis. Weed killers and insecticides in the big box stores are famous for giving you a little squirt bottle of dilute stuff and charging 10 to 100 times what it would cost for the same active ingredient in concentrated form.
I have a 20 # bag of 5% Diazinon that is supposed to treat 10,000 square feet. I sprinkled some around a colony of ant hills yesterday; today, no ants about.
I also have a quart of Hi Yield brand 38% permethrin that I got at a farm store. It will kill ants anywhere (and lots of other things) and is safe for humans. It is used by the military and some outdoor supply companies to treat clothes and mosquito nets. I got it to treat shirts and pants when I went to Nicaragua. It kills mosquitos on contact with the clothes and survives several washings.
I mixed 1/2 tsp of 38% permethrin in a pint of water and applied it with a small paintbrush around a household area where we were seeing ants. Next day the only ants we saw were dead ants.
Thank you for that Bob.
I'm buying some asap.
I left out one thing that dictates what I buy and application:
I have to be
sure what I use is pet safe for my 2 big dogs.
I live on an acre of land in high desert. 90% sand/pebble. Consequently my dogs are literally walking around on anything I put on the ground. There is no granules filtering into a grass lawn effect.
I primarily treat the mounds only. People out here don't or should not broadly spread around granules/powders because we all have to walk around on it. It will stay there until the first good downpour- rain in winter---which might not happen at all.
Most general gardening and or poison instructions simply do not apply to this environment. The dogs would track it into the house. My one bitch even loves to roll around in the dirt to cool off sometimes. see what I'm saying?
So, I'll digress for a minute to explain my situation:
I'm lucky enough that I live in between Joshua Tree National Park and another protected natural bird reserve which harbors 90 bird species and rare migratory fowl. Everyone here is very conscious of that and we all keep poison usage (of all kinds) to a bare minimum.
No one uses gopher poison even though they are all over. It winds up in the food chain. Birds/coyotes would eat the dead poisoned gophers and so on...
The mindset is very different here. I don't get preachy because we all feel the same about it. Down the road.. The people of Joshua Tree feel that if you cannot accept desert critters on your land then this is the wrong place for you to live.
You really don't see people broadcasting toxins or even Off Road Vehicles for that matter.
I just found this on the web so you get the idea:
http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np-image.jotr1116.html
Anyway, that's (the long version) why I started off with the boiling water in the first place.
M.