Carpenter Ants

Yesterday was advertised as "no rain". What we got was intermittent mist.

My usual routine is to check the varmint traps. If necessary, I dispatch the catch. The remains are then thrown the into the Eaton County Bald Iggle Viewing area (corn field).

Then I do a walk-around/overview.

Yesterday my big project was to mow.

I mowed at The Property for two hours. The grass kept clogging the discharge of the mower so it was "Stop the mower. Get off. Pull out the clippings. Get back on the mower and mow until it clogged again."

This old body doesn't jump on and off of a mower as it did when I was young and limber.

Between the gymnastic dismounts and the head-whipping over rough ground, my neck and shoulders are sore.

Carpenter ants

My second project was to cut up the trunks of apple trees that had been culled. The largest ones were riddled with Carpenter ants. I suspect they might have been involved in the trees' decline.

Carpenter ants don't really "eat" wood but they will tunnel through it and they can digest some of the fungi that grows in punky wood. The tunnels, on the the hand, are breaches to the weather that accelerate the decay of the trunk. Being INSIDE the trunk of the tree, there are relatively few options to control them.

One tactic is to put out bait that is poison. Ideally, the poison is very slow acting so the worker ants will take it back to the colony and it will be dispersed to the larvae and even the queen. Then it is game over.

A simple borax-sugar solution is often suggested for this purpose.

Another option is to lace the bait with an Insect Growth Regulator.

Insects typically pass through multiple, very different stages of life from egg, to larvae, to pupae, to adult. The most common IGRs lock the larvae into that stage of life. They never graduate from a nearly-immobile, economic dead-weight juvenile to a mobile, productive adult worker. The number of larvae balloons while the number of worker ants to support them declines. The colony collapses.

Bait placement requires some thought because IGR will also impact honeybee and bumblebee colonies. One option is to not use a syrup-based bait but use something like "Pate" canned catfood as a base. A second advantage of catfood is that larvae need a lot of protein and will likely get a whacking big dose of IGR if you deliver it in catfood.

If you still want to go with a syrup-based bait due to convenience, then it needs to be not-visible to flying bees. For example, you can soak bits of sponge or cottonballs in molasses + a bit of IGR and put them in old tin-cans and squish the top of the can mostly-shut. Ants will quickly find it if it is anywhere near the colony. In my case, near the piles of wood and near trees that appear to be in decline.

Dilution rate is a bit of a crap-shoot. The standard dilution for a water-based spray is about 1% Martin's IGR Insect Growth Regulator concentrate in water. One percent in bait would be about six drops per ounce (roughly 30ml) or 24 drops of concentrate for four ounces of molasses or 33 drops in a 5.5 ounce can of cat food.

Metric is even easier. One ml from a small syringe body is perfect for 100ml (3.5 oz) or 1.5ml for the 5.5 oz can of cat food. 

If you are worried that the petroleum carrier in the IGR will deter the ants, you can train them with unlaced molasses (or whatever) and then switch to the bait with IGR after they are hitting the unlaced bait.

Incidentally, one source suggested using sweetened, smooth peanut butter as a bait. That might work well inside but I would probably lose most of my bait to mice and squirrels when placed outside.

Yellow jackets

It occurred to me as I was preparing this blog-post that the cat food formulation might be a great thing as yellow jacket numbers explode in August.

Yellow jackets love meat and fish

Yellow jacket populations grow exponentially through the summer and early fall and make fruit-picking and chicken slaughtering a spicy adventure.

Truth be told, I liked yellow jackets when I had livestock. They ate lots of flies that bothered my critters. But they are overwhelming in September and October.

If the yellow jackets were attracted to the cat food bait, then the IGR would stop the recruitment of adults from the growing numbers of larvae. The trick will be to remember to start doing it in early August while the numbers are tolerable.