Have any of you guys found a way to combat these little varmits? Not only are they taking honey but they wreak havic on my woodenware.
I don't have the cure, but I have a pretty decent solution for MY problem...
My hives all have those nice, big, expensive outer covers with the sheet metal on top. This is where my ants like to nest - right between the wood and the metal. When I locate a problem, I swap the outer cover with an ant-free cover and carry it to the house. I grab my benzomatic torch and start heating the metal on the cover. It kills some of the ants and sends some of them packing... After a few minutes, I do the same thing again. After hitting it about 4 times with the torch, all the ants are dead or gone. It doesn't cure the problem, but certainly solves it for a few months.
You might want to look into ventilation. Carpenter ants need wet wood. My guess is if you get rid of the moisture you might eliminate the ant problem all together.
Most inner lids are flat on one side and have a rim on the other. If the flat side is up, the black ants will nest between it and the outer lid, and decimate the hive. If the rim is up and the center hole is open, the bees will do away with the ants.
Some sort of mechanical barrier can work for prevention... maybe putting the hive on legs, and putting the legs into some sort of container filled with liquid so that the ants cant travel between the hive and the ground. There is also a product called Tanglefoot that is a sticky barrier goop that can be applied to trees to keep ants away from the fruit.
my hives all sit on cement blocks, i thought that would help but it didn't. these are not what i call carpentr ants, these are little ones like sugar ants.
jdnewberry i like your thinking... just cremate the snot out of them... slow painful death... do they scream when you do it???
the screaming would be nice, but i'm content with the popping!
One year I had them in a hive between the inner cover and the top. Dumped them out on the ground every week and they would come back, then they moved to the hive one over. I dumped the whole mess of black carpenter ants into a bucket of oil. End of the ants. End of story.
great solution if you can get to them! I had to get creative because my sugar ants love to nest deep inside the outer cover. The propane torch was my only working solution... Not to mention being a great way to deal with pent-up aggression
Stand, with legs, legs in cans with a little oil. That's what my plan is, I lost a hive to EXACTLY what is happening to you. The bees absconded. I didn't have a spare lid, and in the three days it took me to build one they all took off. I just finished building some stands (and slatted racks, and SBBs and hive bodies... bored beek in Winter) and luckily have friends with 8 kids that are saving those huge tin cans for me. :-D
Track them back to their lair. Mix equal parts of jelly, borax and water. Leave it for them to eat.
GardStar works great for killing them in the ground, too. My ants always set up shop inside the outer cover, though. But like I said before, I found a solution to that!
I went to a friend's apiary back around 2000. He said he was losing half his hives every year to little black ants. When we lifted the tops, I saw immediately that his home made inner covers were solid plywood. We drilled 2 inch holes in the center of each and put 3/8 in. strips around the top of each. He never lost another hive to ants. You can try all kinds of stuff, but if they can't hide from the bees, they won't stay around.
Quote from: Michael Bush on February 11, 2011, 12:32:12 AM
Track them back to their lair. Mix equal parts of jelly, borax and water. Leave it for them to eat.
What does borax do to bees? I would think jelly water would attract bees too.
Borax poisons the ants. when mixed with something sweet, powdered sugar for instance, they don't know any better and carry it back home. fairly effective, safe way of ant control.
The borax doesn't kill the bees, but when the feed it to the brood it kills the brood and the colony collapses.
Um, sounds like I should use the ant bait in a container that excludes bees but allows ants in. My SHB traps should work nicely. :-D
I never thought about putting the legs of the hive in cans of oil. That's a fine idea, chaange the oil in the truck and kill ants with it...I have never understood what God was thinking when he built ants. I can't think of one good thing that they do....none... nothing....nadda...zilch, they are USELESS! About as useless as i am to my wife when she has honeydos and i am working on bee boxes and stuff!
Quote from: jdnewberry on February 11, 2011, 01:43:41 AM
Borax poisons the ants. when mixed with something sweet, powdered sugar for instance, they don't know any better and carry it back home. fairly effective, safe way of ant control.
Some ants prefer sugar, some ants prefer oil. And some ants are not really interested in baits. I like the idea of baits (with borax or something stronger) as it is very targeted towards the problem and is not like trying to shoot a fly in a china shop with a shotgun. But sometimes, baits don't work for me at all.
Changing the point a bit but...My grandad said that when he used to raise coon dogs, and they got a flea problem in the kennels, they would take an old lamp without the shade on it and leave it on in the middle of the floor all night. They would take several pots with old cooking oil in them and place them around the light...the fleas jump toward the light and eventually end up landing in a pot of oil. I know that has nothing to do with bees but the oil reminded me of that story.
Quote from: greenbtree on February 11, 2011, 12:12:56 AM
Stand, with legs, legs in cans with a little oil. That's what my plan is ....
Where I live, all keepers HAVE to do this. The ants are a major problem and will get into the hives almost immediately without that barrier.
Warning though - If you use
just oil you will kill bees too because those that come back tired and wobbly from foraging end up in the oil in numbers larger than you'd expect. I've seen hive stands with literally hundreds of dead bees in the cans. What we do here is mix in some sand or soil with the oil so you have very oily sand in the can, but not liquid. The ants will not cross the oil, and if a bee hits it they can still get out since they do not get coated by it.
Works very well and we just have to watch that weeds or debris do not "bridge" the cans and allow the ants to cross.