Despite the fact that ants have intelligence and amazing diligence, their neighborhood on the backyard for a person is very unprofitable. And if you want to collect good harvests of fruits and vegetables, prepare to fight with the ants who settled in your garden or in the garden.
Why fight with the ants in the garden?
First, you should know that ants live in close symbiosis with aphids. This dangerous pest feeds on the juice of plants, and the aphid infected culture will simply dry, depriving you of the harvest. The ants guard the aphid, carry it to new shoots, hide it for the winter. In response to such care, the aphids give them the so-called formic milk (honey herring) - a sweet juice, very much loved by ants. That is why it is useless to struggle with aphids, without first eliminating the main reason for its appearance - ants.
Secondly, ants themselves often spoil planting, gnawing buds and stems, berries, destroying seedlings. They use all parts of the plants we cultivate with such difficulty.
And thirdly, the very existence of anthills is undesirable, because they spoil the appearance of the garden, disrupt the structure of the soil. Anthills grow every year, including deep into the sky. And now, when it became clear that fighting ants in the garden is just necessary, let's find out about the best means to achieve this goal.
Popular measures to combat ants in the garden
Unfortunately, the question of how you can get rid of ants, one sentence does not answer. Fighting ants in the garden and in the garden is a long-term systematic process. Ideal is the strategy of struggle, which involves the repelling of insects in order to prevent them from entering their site and in parallel to protect cultural plants. To do this, you can manually transfer the anthills, shadow them, lay spicy plants around the dwelling of ants, and protect the planting with water, foil or scotch barriers.
However, if you have already settled in the garden ants, you will have to use more radical and aggressive means:
- First of all, it is necessary to destroy the nest of ants. Usually, an anthill is poured with steep boiling water and repeated until all insects die.
- It brings good effect and fighting the ants in the garden with chemical means. The main is diazinon and preparations based on it: "Anteater", "Thunder", "Great warrior". Also used are boric acid products (Antimuravei, Mashenka) and universal preparations: DETA, Dachnik, Karbofos, Raptor, Reid, Get, Expel, Delicia "," Frunol Delicia ", etc. Do not expect that by" poisoning "the ants, you will achieve their instant disappearance. The main difficulty in dealing with red and black ants in the garden is that only the worker ants go to the surface, while the main goal - the queen, which produces offspring - is deep in the underground part of the anthill. It is necessary to wait, when workers will transfer a poison inside of a nest and feed it to the queen and larvae. Only after their death an anthill will become empty.
- Ants can be "offered" and homemade poison bait. A tablespoon of sugar is mixed with 1/3 teaspoon borax, dissolve the mixture in 2 tablespoons of hot water, and after cooling add a teaspoon of honey . This bait should be poured into a saucer and placed near the anthill. And to insects it was easier to climb into a saucer, it is recommended to build a bridge from a stick or straw. Once a week, this fluid must be changed, pouring fresh, and gradually the ants will disappear. You can also use decoction of tomato tops, salt, tobacco dust, vegetable oil, lime, and the like.