This Common Baking Spice Is All You Need To Deter Ants In Your House

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Ants can be a real problem once they find entry into your home and start crawling everywhere, on the hunt for food. Not only is their presence frustrating, but it can be pretty embarrassing when someone visits and notices these little black insects on your walls or floors. As long as it's not hundreds (or — gasp — thousands) of ants, you should be able to deter them from entering your house, using a baking spice — it's also the secret addition to your next batch of chili – that pretty much everyone has on hand: cinnamon.

Strategically placed cinnamon can keep ants from wanting to pay you a home visit because, unlike humans at Christmastime, they hate the smell (year-round). Cinnamon just happens to be a pretty fragrant, strong-smelling spice, and it basically blocks ants' ability to communicate where food is. There is an additional reason floating around the Internet for using cinnamon on ants; supposedly, if they inhale it, it will kill them. We can't be sure of the veracity of this report, but using the spice, which can also help eliminate fishy kitchen odors, to keep them away from their point of entry into your house will definitely suffice.

It's pretty simple and straightforward to use cinnamon as an ant deterrent, but you will need to locate roughly where they are entering your house and the path they take once inside (if you find a line of them and can trace them back to the start, perfect). Then you can take your little jar of cinnamon and sprinkle it at the point(s) of entry, and along their trail.

If you don't want cinnamon powder on your floors or countertops, we also recommend using cinnamon oil, like the kind found here, from Handcraft Blends, which has been scientifically proven to be even more effective at deterring ants from any location, per a 2014 study by the International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications. You can place some on cotton balls or pads and leave them wherever ants are entering your house (inside or outside).

You could also add some cinnamon oil to equal parts alcohol and then twice the amount of distilled water in a spray bottle (it's good to keep extras on hand for when you use apple cider vinegar to clean your kitchen) and spray the perimeter of your house. And we're not just talking about adding a few droplets — you'll need around 30 droplets to make a big enough impact to get those crawling insects to think twice before sneaking into your home.