Although we don't get many hummingbirds visiting our yard in southern Connecticut during the summer, we usually do have a single female rubythroat that buzzes through while our trumpet honeysuckle is in bloom. In the summer of 1998, I tried to entice her to a hummingbird feeder by placing it on our deck railing next to the honeysuckle, hoping she would find that she had a steady food source after the flowers had faded away. I figured that once she began to use the feeder I could then hang it outside our kitchen window.
In the meantime, our house was experiencing its yearly invasion of ants. It seems that early summer rains saturating the ground play a part in this scenario, and I've gotten so used to the ants' visit that I tend not to take it too seriously. I know people who will hire an exterminator at the first sign of "trouble," but my husband Bill and I have tried to maintain an organic yard and house. Knowing that the ants will eventually leave on their own is comforting. Besides, we've heard too many stores of the unfortunate results of spraying pesticides.
Years ago, when we visited some of our nonbirding friends, they mentioned the pair of beautiful birds that they'd found in their yard, dead. They had looked the birds up in a book and the closest they could come to identifying them was that maybe they were Eastern meadowlarks. Based on their yard and the habitat in which they lived, we told our friends that this was unlikely. "But they had such beautiful yellow on their wings!" Could the birds have been Northern flickers? We showed them the illustrations in our Peterson guide. Yes, they had indeed been flickers. What would have caused both birds to die? I asked our friends if they had ever sprayed pesticides to control ants. Well, yes they had, why would that matter? When I told them that, although flickers are woodpeckers, they usually consume ants on the ground, they realized that the birds had probably been poisoned by the ants that had been poisoned by the pesticides. I always remember those flickers when ant season comes around.
While I was fascinated by the ants and their invisible trails, my husband had reached his limit of tolerance. We had carpenter ants coming in through the living room behind Bill's favorite chair. They made their scent trail across the hardwood floor, down the hallway, and into the kitchen. Once there, they climbed up the cabinets, onto the countertop, across the stovetop, across another bit of counter, then down to the wastebasket under the sink. We also had what I call "sugar" ants, those tiny ants you find attracted to spilled juice or soda. They were gaining access by climbing onto our deck, then crawling under the kitchen door. Our pantry cabinet and the cats' dry food were right there and very attractive to these ants; they never traveled farther then just inside the kitchen door. Thinking that ant traps (small disks full of poisonous bait) were safe to use because you don't broadcast the pesticide, my husband placed a couple in strategic locations in the kitchen. I was not thrilled with the idea, but didn't have an alternative solution.
A couple of days passed. While I was making fresh sugar water for the hummingbird feeder on the deck failing I noticed the feeder was full of drowned sugar ants. What if they had eaten the ant trap poison first? The hummingbird could be poisoned if she fed from the feeder! I immediately brought the hummingbird feeder inside and put it on the kitchen counter, not wanting to place it back outdoors until we have found a better alternative to our ant problem.
The next morning I realized that I had forgotten to empty and clean the hummingbird feeder, which was still sitting on the kitchen counter, right in the middle of the carpenter ant trail! It was full of drowned carpenter ants! I thought I had found our solution.
After two days, the carpenter ant trail stopped completely. I know we hadn't killed them all because they were not taking poison back to the nest to feed the larvae or the queen. But if all the ants that had followed the trail to the sugar water "death trap" had drowned and not returned to the nest, then there weren't any to reinforce the scent trail back to the nest. The scent trail simply disappeared. That's my theory, anyway.
Our friends, John and Betsy Himmelman, were also having a problem with carpenter ants. They, too, had put out ant traps. Unfortunately, their Jack Russell terrier, Badger, had found one, chewed it up, and promptly got mildly sick. They were thankful that it hadn't been more serious, and were very interested in my nontoxic hummingbird-feeder ant trap. Betsy immediately went out and bought a hummingbird feeder, filled it with sugar water and placed it on their kitchen floor. The ants were attracted to it, but the holes were too small for them to get into the feeder. She bought one with larger holes. John's e-mail to me the following day exclaimed, "Cindi! You were right! As I was sitting here reading my messages, Betsy let out a hoot from the kitchen and then brought the feeder in to show me. It was filled with carpenter ants." Another satisfied customer.
Our sugar ants eventually left on their own. The one step I took was to rub a lemon across their trail at the kitchen door and up into the pantry cabinet. It repelled them a bit, but had to be reapplied every couple of days.
The female hummingbird continued to visit our yard, not only nectaring at our trumpet honeysuckle, but also at bee balm that we'd planted especially for her. We observed her collecting spider webs from around our basement windows, which led us to believe that she may have built a nest nearby. With plenty of nectar plants, plenty of spider webs, and a small stream running through our wooded property, perhaps we are supplying her with all she needs to live and breed. Perhaps she doesn't need a supplemental food source. And since she never showed any great enthusiasm for our hummingbird feeder anyway, we think she'll forgive us if we use it indoors from now on.