Help! Ants are ruining my life.

We have a large ant hill in our ‘wilderness’ area … we watch blackbirds and starlings ‘anting’ by rubbing their plumage onto the area where the ants are to get their formic acid into the feathers and on their skin … as you surmise it helps to keep mites away.

 

Each to their own, @pete!

Mind, give me ants, flying or pedestrian, over those wretched box moth caterpillars any day of the week!

 

Just exterminate them with ant powder. The only solution as I should know. Spent a long time trying to get rid of them in our last house as it had sandy soil by using a lot of different methods until I dug up nests of flying ants then that was that. Just be careful with your dog.

 

To clarify as a lot of folk are confused …Flying ants are not a separate species of ant … they are simply the fertile males of all types of ant that appear for a few days each year to mate with the young queens hatched that year. They do the mating flight then they fall to the ground and die … providing lots of nutrition for young fledgling insectivorous birds that are leaving the nests at that time of year.

 

Yeah, but they also drop in your wine glass! Do you know @Dovefromabove I've never seen the birds eat them, must watch out for it this year.

 

That's fruit flies isn't it?

 

Flying ant day is also the day when the herring gulls get run over. Apparently, the ants contain some sort of formic acid which puts them into a drunk like state...they don't see or care about oncoming traffic. Splattered seagull debris then feeds foxes, carrion birds as well as insects...including ants.....it's just one big going away party!

Ants in the lawn is annoying, I just rake over the mounds before I mow

 

Yeah I've never really got the bother about flying ants either, they all appear from under the patio at ours, and it's not a massive patio, so we share. As long as they don't fall into my tea..