Here is a quick tip to help keep ants out of you humming bird feeder. My feeder is hanging on a shepherds hook so the ants have access to it from the ground, they were taking full advantage of it too, this morning it was covered with them!
I started noticing that the humming birds were not coming nearly as often as before, and wondered if it might have something to do with the ants.
To fix the problem, I rinsed the feeder and refilled it with fresh sugar water, then I took packing tape and starting with the sticky side out, wrapped the pole with it. Two sided tape may work as well, but I think if it rains I may have to replace the tape, and it would be messy to remove. This way, using regular tape, it will slide right off because it's not sticky on the inside and it only takes about a minute to put on again.
Here's the pole after I put the tape on.
It was funny to watch the ants after! They would crawl up the pole and when they reached the tape they stopped short for one to two seconds then promptly turned around and headed down again, only to be replaced by another one coming up from behind. I watched, off and on, for around 20 minutes before they started slowing down. It looks like the tape is a big success! :)
Hopefully the humming birds will start coming back as much as they were before the ant problem!
1 comment:
Glad you were able to stop those ants from getting into the feeder! It's kind of funny, but here we usually have the honeybees start coming to ours. :) Last year we still had lots of hummingbirds to come, so I don't know if the honeybees bother them or not, but this year for some reason the hummingbirds haven't been staying around much. I've only seen one two or three times so far.
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