Refillable ant bait station (not a trap)

WHAT THIS IS FOR

I put the word "trap" in the title so it shows up when you search for "ant trap," but actually, trapping ants is not a very effective way to get rid of them. As long as the nest your ants are coming from is alive, it will likely produce more ants than you can trap. You need to actually wipe out the ants where they live, not just where they are annoying you.

Now if you can find the ant colony and disrupt it in place, that's great, of course; but usually you cannot. Fortunately, being rather smart monkeys, humans have come up with a clever idea: make the ants carry poison back to their colony. Commercial ant bait pulls this trick with all manner of fancy-shmancy pesticides, but you can totally make it work with borax.

Indeed, I've been putting dabs of borax syrup in all sorts of places for quite a while with reasonable success both at attracting the ants and, after a while, at preventing their return. It's messy, though. Especially if you want to do it prevent