Gel-paste Desus from ants attracted our attention almost immediately, as soon as it went on sale. It has several distinctive features - it is a specialized ant remedy (which is rare), produced in Russia (and therefore relatively inexpensive), sold in a large tube (most gel manufacturers, on the contrary, try to pack smaller ones in order to sell at a higher profit) and having somewhat unusual, but highly effective composition.
At first glance, it seems that the manufacturer - the Nizhny Novgorod enterprise "Lad" - managed to create an almost ideal tool for persecuting ants. At least, the main advantages of this kind of funds in Dezus are preserved, some (in particular, insecticidal components) are even strengthened, and at the same time, the main disadvantages have been eliminated.
Let's take a closer look at Desus and find out how good he is at fighting ants...
The principle of operation of Dezus
According to the principle of action, the Desus gel from ants is similar to other gels from crawling insect pests. It contains a bait that attracts ants by smell and taste, and causes them to eat the product and forage it into the nest to feed the queen, larvae, and those individuals that constantly live only in the nest.
It is by transporting the gel to the nest "in pieces" that it is even more effective against ants than against cockroaches. Cockroaches eat what they find, but they don’t feed their other relatives with such poison.Ants, on the other hand, carry more gel to the nest than they themselves eat, and, in fact, do all the work for a person - they themselves “stuff” their offspring with a drug from which this offspring dies.
This is especially important in the fight against pharaoh ants, which can equip the so-called "diffuse" nests, some of which are located far outside the cultivated premises. Wherever they are and no matter how difficult it is for a person to get to them, the ants themselves will carry the poison there and kill their descendants with it.
The task of the owner of the apartment is to simply provide the ants with access to the Desus gel. And the easier this access is, the faster the ants find it, the faster they will be destroyed.
The gel can be applied both directly on surfaces and on cardboard substrates, which are simply laid out in places where ants move, or near cracks and holes from which these insects emerge. From surfaces of furniture, from walls and from household appliances, the gel is simply erased with a damp cloth, leaving no residue. But this, in general, is not a competitive advantage - most modern insecticidal gels also do not leave any marks on surfaces.
A really serious difference and advantage of Dezus is the set of insecticides in its composition.
Insecticide filling gel
Unlike most insecticidal gels, Dezus contains not one, but two insecticides of different chemical nature at once:
- Fipronil - 0.05%
- Boric acid - 0.25%.
Using two of these components in a gel at once is a somewhat unusual and very effective solution.Unusual simply because few people use two active ingredients in gels: the calculation is based on the fact that the gel in any case acts after eating, which means that it enters the digestive tract of the insect in sufficient quantities and almost certainly poisons it. And, perhaps, it is this calculation that leads in some cases to misfires: being literally everywhere surrounded by gels of different varieties, ants massively eat them, often encounter the same insecticides in their composition and develop resistance to them at one speed or another.
But two insecticides in the gel are practically a guarantee that the ants will not be resistant to the agent. If only because resistance to two insecticides of different classes is a huge rarity, which means that ants will definitely die from Desus.
It is also important here that fipronil is an acute insecticide that kills an ant in a few minutes after eating the gel. And boric acid is a less fast-acting poison, but it works without misfires, since ants do not develop resistance to it. In fact, due to fipronil, Dezus kills the bulk of ants quickly, and boric acid then “cleans up” those individuals that could have consumed too little of the agent, or were resistant to fipronil.
How to use the gel correctly
Desus is quite simple to use: one drop is applied to pieces of cardboard, and then these substrates are placed on or near ant paths, near the entry points to the anthill, or where ants are simply regularly encountered.
The gel can be used both indoors and outdoors.Since it is a gel paste, it is afraid of getting wet, and therefore, in places where rain can get on it, the substrate for it should be made in the form of a house from a piece of waterproof (laminated) cardboard folded into a triangle. Ants will still climb into such a house, but the gel will be unharmed even after precipitation.
Indoors, before laying out the substrates, it is desirable to remove all food sources for ants so that the gel remains the only and most accessible food for them.
For baseboards, in very narrow gaps and under the edges of linoleum, you can simply drip the gel without substrates. Here the ants will eat it completely and leave no traces on the surfaces.
Places of application of the gel and the substrate should be checked every 7-10 days. Where the gel is quickly eaten, it must be reapplied. While the ants eat it, you can be sure that they continue to poison their larvae in the nest with it. The gel stops being eaten when the ants completely disappear from the room.
For each square meter of the room, from 1 to 5 substrates can be laid out. Considering that up to 1 gram of gel is used for each substrate, a 100-gram tube is enough for 100 substrates, or 20-100 square meters of space. And since ants visit, as a rule, only kitchens, bathrooms and basements, one tube is enough for almost any apartment or private house.
Desus is safe for humans and animals
The basis of Dezus safety for pets and people (especially children) is bitrex, an artificial bitterness in the gel. It creates an incredibly nasty taste of the gel, because of which the child, and the dog, and the cat will spit it out even before they realize the taste and simply try to swallow it.And when you try to swallow this taste provokes a gag reflex, which prevents swallowing the drug.
Be that as it may, the amount of gel, which contains a dose of fipronil that is dangerous for a person or even for a cat, is physically impossible to swallow. Boric acid, on the other hand, does not cause poisoning in humans and domestic animals in the quantities contained in the gel: previously it was generally used as an antiseptic, including for oral use.
Therefore, Desus, whatever one may say, has practically no weak points. It contains powerful and practically non-misfire insecticides, there is a lot of it in a tube, and such a tube costs less than most insecticidal preparations comparable to it for treating the same area. Security is also top notch. And therefore, it can be safely used to fight ants.
