If you kill the queen with boric acid - where do the forager ants go after that?

Mix the boric acid with a bit of cheap honey and water. They will all eat it and die. But not right away. Enough time will have passed for them to feed it to the queen.

Any of the worked it missed should just die off after that.

I wiped out the ants farming aphids in my garden that way. Got the whole bunch.

And with no ants to protect them, the aphids were a good lunch for lady bugs.

I think they hang around in bars and casinos, telling each antette they meet that since the queen is dead, they will make her a queen, when all they really want is some royal jelly .

the worker ants do not usually live very long when compared to the queen. it depends upon which ant caste you are examining.

it depends upon the ant species, some are more persistent and can recover from the death of a queen and others will not.

but for most ant species they might be around for a while but eventually they'll die off as the colony disintegrates. remember that for most ants the queen is what drives the hive and when she's gone it will not persist too long. if there is no young to feed the foragers will not work as hard and there won't be replacements for those who are lost so the colony will implode. the colony may also be raided by other ants or animals.

songbird

songbird wrote on 25.10.2023 05:18

Thank you for trying to help answer the question from me today.

Here are some images of the bait traps I made with chicken meat.

I think I killed off the queen (see photo) in two different nests with the same bait (sequentially placed, of course), where I sprinkled boric acid on the bait and along the trail to the holes in the wall where they eminated.

They took only hours to swarm the bait but disappeared after about 3 days.

I'm just wondering what happens to the ants that didn't eat the bait as that can't be the only foraging party that the queen sent out that day.

Ah. These are the little tiny ants that are in California. I don't know what species they are though.

I guess that means that one colony will likely fall apart after the queen is poisoned by the boric acid - and the workers will lose interest in the nest or be conquered by another species.

Peter wrote: ...

yes.

also think about just general mass and how things tend to go in life. the smaller something is that is alive the faster it tends to live and then dies.

in ant species i think that is also appropriate for a generality even if it doesn't apply 100%. so the tiny ants will probably only last a short while.

since you seem to have an interest in ants check out the book The Ants from Holldobler and Wilson and by check out i mean request it through your local library. it's big, it's heavy, it's got a ton of information. it will help you id different species.

songbird

as a ps i see that Wilson has another more recent book on ants called Tales from the Ant World which looks to be a more conversational and lighter book. so i've now requested that from the library so i can have something to read. i need a good book and this will likely do quite well... :)

songbird

Peter wrote: ...

if you can kill off the workers early when a colony is first getting going you can take it out, but you have to be pretty dilligent. the queen can feed herself eggs for a while, but if you can keep the foragers from being able to bring back water they will have a much harder time of it.

we have carpenter ants here which tried to start a colony in the wall and door of a shed. for years i was trying to bait it and killing off as many foragers as i could whenever i saw them. this past summer even with a long dry heat spell with almost no rains for many weeks and high temperatures i could still not get rid of the colony but i finally dug out the rotting part of the door sill and replaced it and caulked it all back together and finally i think i got the boogers out of there. that colony had been limping along for years.

sealing up any gaps they can exploit it helpful if you seem to have a lot of ants in the house. find the gaps and get them caulked or sealed up somehow.

another time we had an ant colony get going in the ceiling of all places and it was quite a ways from any food or water but it was able to get established and have many ants before we finally baited it and they all got killed off. within a few weeks they were gone completely. if you've successfully gotten enough bait into their food supply they store in the nest (in other ants) then as those ants dole it out that will kill any workers.

songbird

I don't know the answer to your question. All I know is when I see ants in the house I put out a few Terro liquid ant baits and after they empty those I don't see them again until next year.

This stuff?

They say "For effective elimination, it is important to use multiple ant baits simultaneously" but they don't say why that would be the case.

The active ingredient is sodium tetraborate decahydrate (borax).

The main question, given ants live as long as your pets do, is what stops the foragers from foraging & what eventually kills them off over time.

On page 291 when Holldobler & Wilson talk about the stages of colony growth, it's instructive when they say "colonies of all known ant species are perennial. Like flowering plants, they issue a crop of seeds, then return to an interval of purely vegetative (i.e., worker) growth."

On page 629 Wilson describes how when he reduced a population of 10,000 workers to only 236 in number, he determined the four year old colony reverted to a size-frequency distribution of a young colony instead.

This adaptive demography implies that we must kill off the queen and not just the foraging ants, but unfortunately the words "boric acid" don't occur anywhere in the text, nor does "borax" for that endeavor.

In a hint to what happens after the queen is killed, on page 369 they discuss how dangerous the altruistic life is of foragers, averaging about

However, on page 1239 they discuss how some ant species (such as granivores in Death Valley) store food to last them a dozen years of drought, which implies we might not get the queen with a single boric acid ant bait trap after all.

This is backed up on page 465 which says the laying queen can obtain nutrients from salivary secretions of her own larvae.

It seems that it may not be a sure bet to lay out a single trap to kill the queen as a result of that information but if the queen is killed off, then no more workers will be produced for that colony, where it seems the foragers' normal lifespan will likely be limited more by the dangers of predators and other colonies as you mentioned earlier in this thread than by the fact they can live as long as your typical pet's natural lifespan.

Peter wrote: ...

if you have gotten enough poison into a colony that you've managed to kill off the queen then the remaining ants are also likely to be poisoned.

...

yes, i've noticed that. i would not see them for a month and then a new crop of workers would start foraging and i would take them out as much as i could. then when i don't see them for a while i think the colony was dead but it wasn't. this time i think i finally got it.

at different stages the colony may also have a preference for what it will take as bait. when raising a lot of young they may want more protein and fats and other times more sugars and liquids.

they're facinating creatures and very successful. the old biblical saying about study their ways and be wise is still very apt.

songbird

I believe you. You are astute as Wilson & Holldobler discussed at length that the colony's food preferences changed under their testing sequences.

I agree with you that we have to understand their nature as most people I think just kill the workers which simply stimulates the queen to make more.

I'm still trying to figure out why the bait needs to be wet as I noticed that ants have salivary glands outlined physiologically in that last text.

Also I'm trying to figure out the optimum ratio of boric acid, although I note that many people use borax (which is essentially a diluted form).

Found this

This says the workers die of a confused hunger but they can last years.

This explains the adults can't eat solids and the larvae only eat solids.

What happens when queens die? No eggs, hence no larvae.

What happens when there are no larvae? Bad nutrition, ultimately no reason for the nest. Ants gradually get disorganized, and after a few weeks they die."

The bait doesn't have to be wet unless you are trying to feed workers.

These solid food particles, which are often high in protein, are required by the larvae for growth and by the queen for egg laying. It is the larvae that are key in processing the solid foods for the colony.

Previously it was thought that ant larvae would chew and ingest solid food and then regurgitate the juices for consumption by workers and for distribution to the queen and rest of the colony.

However, it has recently been established, at least in some species, that the food is placed on the belly surfaces of the larvae, generally the older larvae, for digestion externally.

The larvae spit out digestive enzymes onto the food and a few hours later the workers return to imbibe the resulting liquid meal.

This liquified protein is then fed back to the larvae that did all the work and is also passed on to other larvae and reproductives."

This says ants mostly eat carbs and proteins and fats, just like we do.

This says the foraging ants find food mostly by their acute sense of smell.

This says the ants don't store food in the nest but in their stomach.

The Internet is filled with contradictions.

Most references say you need 30 bait traps to make sure you get the queen.

To explain further, first it says "What makes boric acid especially effective is that ants cannot detect its presence, so they unknowingly carry it back to their nest, inadvertently infecting the entire colony" and then it says "The powdered sugar helps mask the bitterness of boric acid, making the bait attractive to ants."

That article is contradictory.

The Internet is filled with contradictions as this says "too much boric acid may cause the ants to detect the presence of the boric acid and they simply will not feed on the bait."

Then you have others saying keep the bait as dry (not wet) as possible.

While almost every article says boric acid shouldn't be consumed, this one says "Look for food-grade boric acid, as it's safe for home use."

Those most likely are Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) says this.

Wikipedia says Argentine ants form a mega colony without antagonism.

Wikipedia says "Argentine ant colonies almost invariably have many reproductive queens, as many as eight for every 1,000 workers." which is roughly about one queen for every 100 Argentine ant workers.

Wikipedia even says the queens forage with the workers "When they invade a kitchen, it is not uncommon to see two or three queens foraging along with the workers."

While they say there are so many queens you won't get them all, it says how to kill them. "Borate-sucrose water baits are toxic to Argentine ants, when the bait is 25% water, with 0.5-1.0% boric acid or borate salts"

...

for the smaller common ants i think the food the foragers actually consume is liquid (nectar from flowers and sometimes honeydew produced by aphids or other sucking bugs). the meat and fats in the diet for the larvae is what comes from bugs or perhaps small animals (and even sometimes other ant colonies).

there's a lot of recipes available on-line. i've not had very good luck with the carpenter ants i was trying to bait into oblivion but the other smaller brown (a very common ant here) took the same bait ok. and setting up a few bait stations near their colonies would take them out after a while. the problem we sometimes have is that there are many raccoons around so they are always going for any bait and chewing up some plastics to get at the baits.

songbird

Unfortunately, I found out the ants I have (Argentine ants) are almost completely different from all other ants in almost every important way.

For example, queens are 10% of the colony and they forage just like the workers do, but what's worse is the colony stems from a single queen (out of Louisiana as it were) such that they don't fight with each other.

That makes their mega colony span from San Diego to San Francisco so there is no way to eradicate the colony, which, depending on weather more than anything else, will attack all houses in that area at the same times.

Unfortunately, killing a queen does nothing for multi-queen Argentine ants.

It can be done but it has to be done on a statewide level like they did on the islands by dropping the poison bait beads from a hovering helicopter.

We're doomed.