Experiment

A few days ago, I made an experiment using baking soda and a few crumbs of cake.

I was at the terrace working on my crocheted blouse. I was surrounded with my collection of plants.

One of the leaves was touching the table that I was using. A few minutes later, I noticed a lot of ants crawling on the table and traced them to the leaf that was touching the table.

I am not afraid of ants but I really, really hate them. They have destroyed a lot of my plants, especially the flowering plants.

In one of my Youtube marathon, I saw a vlog regarding baking soda as ant insecticide. He mixed a powdered sugar to the baking soda to entice the ants and therefore eat the baking soda at the same time. It is said that the baking soda produces carbon dioxide that will explode inside the ant that has digested them.

Although it will kill the ants but not right away. So the intention is for the ants to bring the baking soda to their colony and hopefully, the queen ant, who produces a lot of baby ants, will be able to eat some baking soda too and therefore will be killed.

Seeing those big ants made me think why not try and do an experiment if it is true that baking soda kills ants.

Although the recipe calls for a mixture equal parts of baking soda and confectioner sugar I use cake crumbs as they are also sweet.

I place the mixture in a small saucepan and put the leaves directly on top of the mixture.

I was waiting patiently for a while for some ants to gather inside the pan. 5 minutes... 10 minutes... 20 minutes... have passed, still no ant came. So I let it be and continued with my crochet.

I was so engrossed with my crochet that I did not notice the ants that were swarming on the pan right away.

From then on I watched the movements of the ants.

I really cannot attest if the baking soda is really an insecticide and can kill ants as I did not saw any ants that were being killed.

There are also write ups that said that baking soda mixed with powdered sugar as insecticide is a myth and there are some that are positive enough that indeed baking soda mixed with powdered sugar is an insecticide.

But I noticed other things. There are attitudes of the ants that are similar to people.

1. Hardworking - they say that ants are hardworking. They scavenge for food and bring them to their colony. There was one ant that moves so fast. He carries with him the crumbs up to the highest part of the leaf and leave it there. Then he went back down to get some more. Many times he did this.

2. Theft - one ant came out from the soil, went up the leaf and eat the crumbs that the hardworking ant gathered.

3. Greedy - I saw some that are just staying put and are just eating on the crumbs. Soon, they were very full that they were not able to move. They did not move to bring the food back to their colony to share with the rest of the ants.

I left the saucepan overnight at the table. The following day, almost half of the baking soda were gone. I hope that some were being brought to the colony and also hoping that it is not a myth after all.

That's all folks.

Thanks for reading this nonsense of an article. 😂🤣