Ant fossils have been found in amber that is dated almost 100 million years old so there have been ants much longer than there have been humans on Earth.
If even the dinosaurs couldn’t stomp out ants it’s unlikely that anyone living in St. Albert in 2013 will have much luck either.
The ants will win.
“I encourage people to live with them because they are everywhere. In any one-hectare of land anywhere in Alberta, the ants on that hectare would outweigh all other animals – vertebrates and invertebrates. So if you can picture all the bunnies, all the birds, all the moose walking around and all the beetles, mites and worms too, the ants are so numerous they would outweigh them all,” said Dr. Tyler Cobb, Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the Royal Alberta Museum.
Ants have their place in the world – even the ones in your house or backyard.
“They are numerous and that’s why they are so ecologically important. They are important for nutrient cycling, for plant protection from other insects and for seed dispersal. And if they are in your house, where they are looking for food, which could be sugar or grains, though you may not want to know it, they may also be looking for other insects,” Cobb said.
There are 93 known species of ants in Alberta. Each species has different foraging habits, depending whether they are predators or seedeaters or whether they just want to snack on the sugar left on your kitchen counter.
“They have a highly organized society, like ourselves, with division of labour for the good of all. Ants were the first agriculturalists,” Cobb said as he described the aphid-farming techniques that ants use.
“If you have ants on your peonies, then the ants are farming. They have formed a relationship with the aphids on the peonies and are milking the aphids for the honeydew they produce.”
Birds such as flickers and woodpeckers eat ants, Cobb said.
“Woodpeckers and crows like bathing in ants. They’ll disturb an ant nest to get a frenzy of ants going. It’s a weird behaviour, but the ants remove mites in their feathers,” he said.
Cobb said that if he found ants inside his house, he’d get down and study them in fascination, trying to find their hidey-holes.
Maybe! But for those not into the live-and-let-live ant mood, what are the alternatives?
“Be careful with pesticides,” Cobb warned. “You could kill good things too.”
With a frightening, almost sadistic turn of phrase, Cobb compared ants to spiders.
“Ants are like spiders. In any building, new or old, you are never more than 20 feet from a spider. If you kill them with poisons, you negate all the good things they do,” he said.
Inside, ant traps only work if the bait attracts the insects. If there is another more plentiful source of food – like the green plastic compost bin on the kitchen floor – the ants will probably leave the traps alone.
“You’ve got to make sure they are feeding on the bait or it won’t work. They take the poison back to the colony. In most cases the poison is borax,” said Jim Hole of Hole’s Greenhouses and Gardens.
Sprinkling borax outside near an ant colony may kill them, but borax could also kill your plants.
“Don’t scatter borax on the ground because if you use too much, it gets into the soil and kills plants,” Hole said, adding that for the most part, if the ants aren’t in his way in the yard, he leaves them alone.
When using any poison, be especially careful if there are pets or small children in your home.
“Most ant poisons are mixed with sugar to encourage the ants. The sweetness could be attractive to dogs or children too,” Cobb said.
If the ants become too bothersome in his garden, Hole sticks a weed-feeder right down into the ant colony.
“I use a root feeder, and stick it right down in beside the ants and blast them with water, and sometimes a bit of poison and I keep repeating the process every day. But again, if the ants are in your vegetables or strawberries, obviously you are not going to use poison,” Hole said.
Hole compared ants to weeds.
“You are never going to eradicate every ant any more than you’ll eradicate every weed. What you need is a combination of tolerance and control,” he said.
Nonetheless, ants may be discouraged with a few old-fashioned remedies.
Clear the foundation outside your home and take away debris such as compost, rotting leaves and branches. Remove the decaying wood in windowsills and doorframes. If you can find where they are coming in, seal the holes with caulking.
Try making a compost-tea by pouring boiling water onto chopped rhubarb leaves. Let the mess steep for a few days and pour on the ant nest. The rhubarb leaves contain poisonous oxalic acid, so the ants will move over and at least may not be in the flower or vegetable garden and will be in another part of the yard instead.
Worker ants may scurry across the kitchen floor looking for food. Once they find it, the ants lay down an acid-based pheromone trail to attract their buddies.
“If you put down vinegar it confuses them. Cinnamon may also confuse them, but there is no foolproof way to get rid of them. No remedy is 100 per cent effective. Remember, in your back yard it’s not uncommon to have 20,000 to 30,000 ants in one nest and a typical yard will have 10 to 20 nests so in all probability you have tens of millions of ants in your yard. You can never stomp on all of them,” Cobb said.
Hole agreed adding that if things get really bad and the ants appear to be taking over, he suggests one drastic method to his customers.
“If the ants get really bad, I tell people, ‘Sell the house’!”
Sadly, Hole was only half laughing.
