The best home remedies for ants

Formicidae, as the ants are called scientifically, are among the creatures that populated this world long before us: the oldest finds are 100 million years old, which means that primeval ants crawled around under dinosaurs for another 35 million years. The ants obviously weren’t that stupid when it came to their survival strategies – in fact, Formicidae realized “a few million” years earlier than humans that living in organized states is a pretty good survival strategy for everyone involved.

Seems self-evident, but it isn’t: We humans learn every day in the news that it is not that easy to set up a functioning state. Ants are more advanced than humans, they live in eusocial = comradely organized communities of states, with the following characteristics:

• cooperative brood care
• fertile and sterile community s members
• Joint procurement of food, fair distribution
• For all beneficial coexistence of several generations

Most of us humans still manage cooperative brood care. Since the invention of the pill, the division into fertile and infertile has at least actually existed in most parts of the world. Joint procurement of food may be fine, but if it is distributed fairly, that’s the end of it. In Germany, an annual turnover of food from discount stores currently ends up in the garbage instead of filling the hungry; the coexistence of several generations, which is beneficial for everyone, has been falling behind for decades. For the biologist, people live together in a “quasi-social” or “semi-social” way, and organized violence like war is known to no other creature apart from us anyway – actually, we should learn something from the way ants live together instead of fighting them/ destroy.

Benefits of living together

For all their fascination with ant colonies, people usually lack the high degree of altruism that characterizes eusocial states. Therefore, in order to give us humans a reason to tolerate Formicidae in the garden, we need more selfish arguments.

There are actually several reasons to let ants do their work in the garden in peace:

• they are among the hardest workers on our planet
• There are around 12,000 different species of these effectively working insects
• they are among the most powerful tillers our planet has to offer
• However, only a good 100 species of ants live in Germany
• Most rare and critically endangered, we only see a few species
• take care of our soils, forest soils, arable soils and garden soils
• are often active underground and loosen the soil in the process
• In doing so, they pave the way for other beneficial insects such as earthworms
• As omnivores, they consume parts of plants such as seeds, pollen and fruits.
• Almost half of our plants use the appetite and diligence of the ants to spread the seeds
• Many plants produce special ant delicacies for this purpose:
• Their seeds carry oily appendages, the composition of which is perfect for ants
• Alongside this, ants also plaster appreciable numbers of insect pests
• The excretions from these meals benefit our soil as nutrients
• Formicidae process more organic residues for soil than earthworms

win-win situations

The busy work of the ants is not only good for our garden soil, there is still some garden life that benefits from the ants (and vice versa):

• Many species live in symbiosis with other small organisms
• The black garden ant z. B. with scale insects and aphids
• The lice provide honeydew (no big sacrifice, that’s their excrement)
• The garden ant protects the lice against their natural enemies, such as ladybugs.
• Springtails like to live in ant nests and swarm from there to work (production of humus from plant residues)
• Ants love strawberries, that’s what the strawberries wanted, ants dutifully transport the seeds back to nature after the feast in the nest
• Formicidae are particularly useful on the compost heap, where they noticeably aid in composting.

As a result, the win-win situations are actually win-win-win situations, because not only the two partners in the ecological relationship benefit. But also we humans or the gardeners and farmers among the people who get a good soil prepared to cultivate crops and ornamental plants.

ants in the garden

Nevertheless: worker ants are not so into garden aesthetics, the road is laid on a direct path to fat prey. Ant queens also have little sense for garden design, the nest is built in the right place, even in the middle of the lawn or in an otherwise (for humans) unsuitable place. Strong arguments are needed to convince these ants of the reasonableness of a human decision that wants to avoid rich fishing grounds or the ideal nesting site. Here are a few:

1. Lock out ants
Sometimes an insurmountable barrier is enough to set the ants on new paths, e.g. B. A sticky ring discourages Formicidae from climbing trees.

2. Luring ants somewhere else
Another friendly “argument” is to redirect them to a place where even fatter prey awaits. This can be actively placed by the gardener, e.g. B. in a track to the compost heap where the ants are supposed to settle. Ants love sweets, honey, sugar water or jam and follow them.

3. Let them be eaten
Not quite so friendly, but useful if the ants in your garden seem to get the upper hand, is the settlement of natural enemies.

These natural enemies include B. the ant lion, the larva of the ant maiden. Ant lions build traps, and colonizing them is ecologically a good idea anyway: They are important for functioning ecosystems, and all 11 Central European species have become quite rare.

4. Disturbing
The fairly common black road ants and red-yellow meadow ants like to build their nests in lawns or beds. If you don’t want them there, simple raking can help, for ants a disturbance à la “heaven falling on their heads”.

If you don’t rake like the Eraser, it only helps if you catch the ants in the early stages of colonization. In general, you should better get used to the fact that there is no (well-growing) lawn without ants, ants belong in a good lawn just as much as earthworms. Not in a garden with children? You could put it that way, but the scientific consensus seems to be that overprotective parents who don’t educate their children about the micro-life around us have a good chance of instilling in their children one of the 13 recognized insect phobias… one of those phobias is specifically responsible for ants.

5. Evaporate
If you scent ants, they will evaporate – if you present the right vapor to the ant’s nose (in the antennae). Many substances are said to stink ant noses, so try them out because the ants may see it differently:

• vinegar, lemon juice (careful, acidifies the soil)
• Coffee powder (also NPK fertilizer)
• Kapuzinerkresse
• Chervil (also said to keep lice, mildew and snails away)
• Lavender; However, it is not entirely clear which of the 30 differently scented species
• marjoram
• sage
• thyme
• Rue, planted or chopped up around the area to be protected
• Wormwood and wormwood manure (caution, not all plants tolerate it either)
• cinammon

6. Forced relocation
If the place from which you want to drive the ants away is very far from the intended ant quarters, the honey trail often does not lead to the goal. So that the Formicidae don’t do without the last part of the journey (e.g. to the compost heap) in Ringelnatz’s sense, you should offer air transport in this case:

You fill a flower pot with a mixture of soil, crumpled newspaper and/or excelsior and place this perfect ant villa (nesting aid) at the edge of the ant trail. Close enough to be unmissable, and the wrong way around, which can be done with a strip of cardboard. When the ants have moved in, slide a shovel under the flower pot and move it and the ant colony to the desired location. This method is only suitable for “long-distance moves”. Formicidae cling to their painstakingly built nest and will return to it from distances of up to 20m.

ants in the house

Ants in the house have lost their way or have been brought in, they don’t find human dwellings that exciting in themselves. What to do depends on the quantity:

1. You can simply ignore loners, they will go back into the garden of their own accord (of course you can help with this by providing free transport).
2. Ant trails through the home can be diverted outside with distraction feeding after you’ve found and eliminated what attracted the ants.
3. Ant nests in the house are really rare, sexually mature ants are more likely to swarm out of a nest nearby for their nuptial flight. Even with ants, the blood is then located somewhere else than in the brain(s), it can happen to those willing to mate that they don’t quite end up in your house as planned if that “gets in the way”. This happens in the warm season, just leave the window open until the nuptials understand that ant mates are only found outdoors.

If it really is a nest, you should read up on how to deal with the relevant ant species and whether you need to do anything at all in the forum of the German Ant Protection Agency at www.ameisenschutzwarte.de – if the information in the forum is not enough, they will help you dedicated volunteer members are also welcome to the forum.

Perhaps nesting ants have done you a (annoying) favor, because ants can only actually build nests where something structurally wrong is wrong, in exposed insulation or in damp wood…

Even myrmecophobics (people who are overly afraid of ants) will hardly be able to keep ants away forever. Sealing with silicone etc., which is sometimes recommended, can help if ants keep getting lost in the house via the same entrance. But you never get all the cracks so tight that no ants can fit through. If you could do that, living in such a hermetically sealed structure would certainly not be comfortable or healthy. Tea tree oil on all doorsteps is also said to help and is the more convenient way.

Chemical control

Here we are deliberately talking about home remedies, because chemicals against ants are simply not an option:

• Contact agents in spray cans and the like only kill the workers, which does nothing at all apart from potentially harmful breathing air.
• Ant bait kills everyone, including queens and larvae, but what’s being circulated here via some pretty unscrupulous trading platforms could kill you in the long run, too.
• So bait gel etc. are sold with fipronil, spinosad, d-phenothrin and sprays with the active ingredients phoxim, chlorpyrifos.
• Nerve poisons, sometimes extremely toxic for bees, for ant control by private individuals are not permitted in our country for good reason.
• That doesn’t always bother retailers, a well-known mail order company offers three of these poison cocktails in a bundle at a special price.

You can assume that such dealers don’t really appreciate you and they manage to turn the “win-win” situation into a real lose-lose situation, which puts your health and the environment at risk.

The ant and the madness of the web

In terms of the ant (and not just the ant), mass commerce and the non-editorially controlled part of the Internet have even more to offer. There are certainly articles and tips floating around that can put you in an only lose situation (with you as the loser):

• Vacuuming up: An idea, the animals disappear into the vacuum cleaner, but live on there – so it only makes sense with a new bag, which is then transported into nature, cut open and knocked out.
• Pour gas on it and light it: yes, and call the fire brigade and the boys in straightjackets who will take the pyromaniac away!
• Combat aphids: probably so that the ants starve, preferably with chemicals too, aphids gone, ants gone, garden dead.
• Build a water barrier: Ants don’t walk through water, that’s true, but very few people want to live with rivers in their homes.
• Oil road, ants should not cross: See above, the oil-carrying river also disturbs the living room.
• Chalk not to be stepped over: Like any other mountain range you pile up for the ants, they just have to figure out how to use the space around the maze walls.

Conclusion Leading
a conflict-free life with ants is not one of the challenges of our world. In fact, ants are very important in the garden. Ants are also under nature protection, sometimes very strict, and the legislature has not specified this protection because they think ants are so cute. But because we need ants for a healthy environment.