Ants eating adobe house….sigh

Hi everyone. I am new to this forum. A year ago I moved to Uruguay and married a lovely Uruguayan man. We bought 27 acres and an old adobe brick house that we are restoring as naturally as possible, along with growing our own food. Here is our CHALLENGE: ants. All kinds. They eat through everything. And they are coming up through our wood floor in the bedroom that we just put in a month ago. I have tried a blend of neem oil and soap spray, cinnamon, diatomaceous earth. Does anyone have other ideas? We are concerned about our foundation (which is earthen brick and a thin layer of concrete (sorry about the concrete, we’re learning). The se ants eat through concrete. Very quickly. And put piles of dirt in the room in just days.
A side note: I’ve mixed an impermeable paint with nopales using the anthill dirt as a pigment, if anyone wants the recipe.
Any advise on how to control the ants would be great!!! Thank you. And thank you Paul for creating such a rich resource. ❤️

I have been using vinegar to kill ants for many years.

I put the vinegar in a spray bottle and spray anywhere that ants are seen.

Every so often the residual effects of the vinegar wear off and the vinegar needs to be sprayed again.

The way I found this solution was that I use vinegar to clean my kitchen counters.

One day I came home from work only to find dead ants all over my kitchen counter.

Thanks so much Anne. Ive used vinegar too. I forgot to put that on my list. They still keep coming. 🐜🐜🐜

Hey Justyn- hello just slightly north from you in Brazil! We also have buckets of ants. All kinds of ants. Ants with ants on top.
It sounds like they might be tunnelling their way through your concrete, maybe not actually eating it. Are you in a really rainy place that they're looking for somewhere dry to nest? I find in my garden it helps to think about what they're looking for and then encourage them to go elsewhere to find it. Maybe set up a space for them elsewhere, with something sweet they like to eat, away from the house, and then mercilessly harrass them til they leave. Usually I do that by dumping boiling water on their holes, but vinegar would probably do just as well (spraying a 50/50 vinegar/water mix).
I think mixing the paint with anthill dirt is also a good idea, there is conventional wisdom saying that one kind of ant will repel another kind, so if you have ant dirt from different ants that might be interesting.

Something that I notice about ants is that I had ants farming ants.  I had at least three different size ants farming smaller ants.  Similar to how ants farm aphids, I guess.

I really like the idea that Tereza suggested of boiling water in the mounds.

I know it is a real battle and I surely don't have that big of an ant problem ...

Hang in there and be persistent.  Hit them with everything you have.

i imagine you may have already considered this, but they also might be termites, not ants. When I lived in a house with a thin concrete pad foundation we had some come up through the floor and bring their mess with them.
I think organic control is probably the same for termites as ants. But I'm thinking this with regard to adobe-- is there some sort of organic matter in the adobe mixed with the clay that they might be eating, if they were actually termites??? Yikes.

Hi Justyn,
First, I agree with Anne and Thereza that it is best to try the least toxic things first. That's always the safest route to go. But I've kind of been down your road before and I know how it feels. It sucks! Here was my takeaway....

I have a big yard with lots of beds to grow vegies. Among other things I usually grow 50-60 tomato plants and 20-30 pepper plants spread out in groups all around the yard. About 7 years ago something started killing them, like one or two at a time, here and there. One day the plant would start to look sick and it would be totally dead 3 days later. Couldn't see the problem at first. Then I realized that ants were climbing up the trunk of the plant about 8-10 inches and they had drilled a hole  into it. The line of ants going up and down the trunk were entering that hole and rapidly hollowing the stem out and carrying the pulp away. I battled those ants all summer long. I kept a notebook of everything I had tried on which plants. I started with very nontoxic things like cayenne pepper spray and rotten garlic/eggs mixed with water. Moved on to things like neem oil, D.E.,boric acid and bt. If I remember correctly I tried 27 or 28 different things and combinations of things  and none of them worked. I called our University Extension agent and she didn't believe ants would ever do this. When she asked for pictures I told her to check her email, I had already sent them. She called me a few weeks later to tell me that she had just heard from a handful of other people in our county who had my same problem. They couldn't find any solution either. Lots of people said I had to find their trail and cut them off before they got to the plant. The problem was, there was no trail. They had moved their nest directly under each plant as they attacked it.

It took all summer but I finally found the solution. After they had killed a whole lot of plants! Pyrethrins/Permethrin. And I highly recommend that you read up on this subject if you decide to try this. I try to be 100% organic so I first bought a bottle of organic pyrethrins made from the flowers. Here's the wikipedia page.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrethrin They are ridiculously expensive! A 16 ounce bottle cost me $30. and it only made 4.5 gallons. But I mixed it up with water and did a deep 1 gallon soil drench on a plant and it worked! Instantly! It worked on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th plants. Then I ran out and just couldn't afford to spend so much money again. So I had to go the cheaper route and buy synthetic permethrins. Here's the wikipedia page.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permethrin Again, it worked instantly. My local hardware stores carries 2 kinds of permethrins. One is called Bonide Eight for vegies, fruits and flowers. It says it safe to use on all edibles. It contains 2.5% permethrins. Another is called Hi-Yield turf, termite and ornamental. It contains 38% permethrins. The label says do not use it near food or in your home. So the important consideration is how much you dilute it before you use it.

If you decide to try this please  be a good consumer  and do your own research first.

Hope this info helps you.

Debbie

I have been reading about planting pyrethrum plants then drying the flower petal and making a spray to control insects.

Here is a thread about planting them for insect control:

https://permies.com/t/177393/Pyrethrums

Hi Anne,
I'm weedwhacking today so I sit down and take a whole lots of breaks! And I saw that thread too. I think it was Hans that mentioned that there are a lot of different chrysanthemums but only one has a great deal of the insecticide in it. chrysanthemum cinerariifolium. I tried to get seeds for that plant one year but kept hitting dead ends. I'm pretty sure that it is mostly produced in Africa. But I do believe it can kill almost anything so I was very cautious with it. Doing a small soil drench is a lot different then spraying it all over plants.