TANSY FOR ANTS | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 12, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 19.

TANSY FOR ANTS.

A SURE remedy for these summer pests is here outlined. Big, fat, black ant-mires and little, lean, scurrying red ants have put in their early appearance at our house for the past few summers, taking possession of every pantry and cellar shelf where food is kept, and persistently remaining until frost comes. I have tried washing the shelves in alum water, and circling the sugar bucket and cake box with chalk marks, thick and broad, to strand the foraging, and sifted sponges full of sugar, and, when filled with victims, have plunged them into hot water. I have put sulphur bags and borax lumps and cedar chips and tarred paper strips in my cupboards and ice chest, but with no other result than to see both black and red ants scampering as lively as ever over the supposed exterminator.

"Why don't you try tansy?" the new girl said one morning last spring. "Mother always drives them off by putting tansy leaves on her shelves." I had little faith in the bundle of green-leaved stalks she picked that day and laid on every food shelf in cupboard, pantry, and cellar—less faith, even, than I had in my plump little sulphur bags and wobbly chalk marks. But the tansy did it; for there was a stampede of ants, big and little, black and red, presently from my shelves—a thorough routing; for from that day to this, six weeks, not one ant have we seen, though we leave the sirup can unsealed and the sugar bucket on the shelf.—Household.