Ants

Living in Maine seems to come with ant problems.  One day I'll take a picture of our lawn.  I won't let people go barefoot, because the front is literally wall-to-wall small ant hills.  
Our trees tend to become Carpenter Ant fodder until we have to cut the infected tree down, then the ants move on to the next tree.  We know a tree is infected when Woodpeckers begin pecking it.

Every year we have a carpenter ant problem.  It starts in Spring and I find myself fighting them on a daily basis.  Several times I've been woken up by one crawling on me.  Thankfully, I've only been bitten once.  When they bite, they hang on and it hurts.

This year, we had small black ants that looked like sugar ants along with the Carpenters.    I couldn't find where the ants were coming in, and they didn't seem to be after anything specific.

I hate putting out poisonous bait, and a friend just posted this link on her Facebook.  It is a simple non-poisonous ant killer:

http://www.food.com/recipe/get-rid-of-ants-ants-ants-203233

A few posted that it worked, but the ants came back and ignored the ant killer.  One person suggested that they may be protein ants and to put peanut butter or another protein in the lid of the bait trap.

Unfortunately, I used Raid to get rid of my ants, but I fully plan on trying this next time around.  When we redid the girls' bedroom, we put Boric Acid on the outer edges of the room, under the drywall, before we laid new flooring and put molding down to hide it.   I especially like the baby food jar bait around the outside of the house (it's in the comments for the recipe).   With a new grandbaby due any day, I will soon have a good supply of baby food jars.