Keep Ants Away By Mopping Your Floors With This Cheap, Natural Ingredient

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If you love to spend time in the kitchen, your jar of cinnamon is probably never too far away. From mile-high apple pie to sweet cinnamon bun recipes, there are a lot of ways to incorporate the fragrant and flavorful spice in baking. But it turns out there are more ways to use cinnamon around your house than you might expect. As summertime arrives, you may suddenly find your kitchen (or other rooms in the house) crawling with tiny black ants. They'll do more than just bug you on their solemn march straight up the side of your garbage cans. Ants can transmit a variety of foodborne diseases like E. coli and Salmonella, which can quickly turn your favorite baked goods into bad stomach cramps. If you're wondering how to really get rid of ants for good, you'll be glad to learn that you can use cinnamon powder or cinnamon oil added to water to create a floor cleaner that will deter them.

Ants have an amazing sense of smell, which is why they're able to find everything from a few crumbs to that casserole you just took out of the oven in a matter of minutes. They don't have noses, but they do have antennae that are constantly moving and tapping around to track down the chemicals that make scent. They lead each other to food by creating a pheromone trail leading directly from their nests to your kitchen floor, tabletop, or other tasty spot, which is exactly where our hero, cinnamon, comes into play.

Although cinnamon isn't capable of killing ants, the cheap and natural ingredient does interfere with their pheromones enough to deter them. A study published in Insects determined that ingredients like EVOKE OCCU Cinnamon are some of the best essential oils to naturally deter ants. Yet another study from The Journal of Emerging Investigators found that mixing cinnamon oil and lemon juice has a synergistic effect that works especially well while having none of the potentially toxic risks of commercial pest killers that are commonly used to combat an ant infestation.

Whether or not you decide to put a little lemon juice in the mix, adding cinnamon to your mop water is an extremely effective way to keep ants away. There are a few ways you can do it. If you decide to invest in a bottle of cinnamon essential oil, since it isn't water-soluble, make sure to emulsify your mixture by starting with a little grain alcohol or liquid Castile soap before adding 10 to 20 drops into a large amount of hot water. You can put a few cinnamon sticks in a pot of boiling water to create a decoction that won't just get your floors ant-free. It will also make your house smell heavenly. Mopping is an ideal approach, especially if there are sticky spots on your floors that seem particularly appetizing to your not-so-friendly neighborhood ants. But if you don't have the time or inclination to make your own cinnamon mop water, sprinkling a little powdered cinnamon around any ant hotspots should have a similarly repellent effect.