Can We Talk About Ants?

Ants are the bane of my beekeeping existence.  It's bad enough when they go after my hive-top feeders.  But last year I lost a nuc to ants.  They started out going after the nectar and honey.  Then they moved onto the brood.  They were literally chewing through the caps to get to the brood.  I moved that hive onto a cinder block in the middle of a kiddie pool full of water.  That kept the ants out, but I lost too many bees to drowning.  I tried diatomaceous earth and the ants laughed at me and kept on crawling.

One thing that did help a little was bait bottles.  Take a plastic soda bottle and put a couple of tablespoons of borax and sugar, with just enough water to make a paste.  Then poke holes that are big enough for ants, but too small for bees to have access.  In theory, the ants will take the bait back to the nest, kill the queen, and voila...no more ants.  In reality, it helped, but didn't stop the carnage.

What finally worked was a specialized stand that my husband built out of PVC pipes and the rack out of an oven.  Each leg has a little cup on it that holds water.  The ants can't cross it and the bees aren't likely to drown in it.  That stopped the ants, but by that time the only thing I could do was combine the two halves of the resource hive into a single 4 over 4 nuc for the winter.  That became the nuc that we started out with this season.

This year, I'm trying something different.  I've been reading how ants hate cinnamon.  So, I've propped up all of my hives on cinnamon sticks.  It forms a physical barrier between the stand and the hive.  I suspect that I'll have to replace the sticks every couple of weeks depending on how often it rains, but hopefully this will prevent problems this year.