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Ant question

 
Pearl Sutton
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It seems my kitchen ants that I haven’t dealt with do not have a night shift. They are in the house, and that area still has solidly insulated windows, no light in there unless I turn on the electric ones.

How do ants know it’s bedtime and why don’t they work nights?

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greg mosser
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i wish i could tell you, pearl! they’re different by species - some are purely diurnal like the ones you’ve got, some are purely nocturnal, and some go 24 hours a day. how they can tell when they’re inside with only artificial lights, though…have you asked them?

do you know what sort they are? do they go after sugars or proteins? have they got one little middle segment between the main body part (the ‘promesonotum’) and the rear part, or two? large, tiny, or truly micro?
 
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Vinegar is the right answer.  A spray bottle with a 50/50 solution of vinegar and water.  End of the story...

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I suspect its instinct. Like how birds know how to build nests or how monarch butterflies know to migrate or how some animals know the right foods.

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Eino Kenttä
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Suppose part of it could be a matter of circadian rhythm, also known as biological clock. Almost everything alive has one. It's not really exact as clocks go, but ants are communicating creatures. What if they "reinforce" each other's circadian rhythms? Like, if a lot of them think that one went to bed too early, they go "hey, wake up and get back to work, it's not night yet" and so a consensus is formed that might be more exact than the circadian clock of each individual ant?
 
Pearl Sutton
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greg mosser wrote:i wish i could tell you, pearl! they’re different by species - some are purely diurnal like the ones you’ve got, some are purely nocturnal, and some go 24 hours a day. how they can tell when they’re inside with only artificial lights, though…have you asked them?

do you know what sort they are? do they go after sugars or proteins? have they got one little middle segment between the main body part (the ‘promesonotum’) and the rear part, or two? large, tiny, or truly micro?



Ah, so different species work different times! That's the part I didn't know!!

The ants I have seen before in the kitchen worked nights too. These are too itty bitty to even begin to see what they look like unless I got one to voluntarily hold still under a microscope, can't see that happening.

Not even going to try to figure out their species, I haven't had time to deal with them, taking more time to figure out who they are before I deal with them just isn't going to happen :D

Thank you for explaining they are not all the same, guess I never thought about it before. The only ants I have paid attention to when they are most active are temperature linked, and I know to work fast in their area while it's still chilly to keep them from biting me, or if I am there later to make sure I have no exposed skin for them to reach.  

Thank you Greg!!  :D
 
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Pearl Sutton wrote:These are too itty bitty to even begin to see what they look like unless I got one to voluntarily hold still under a microscope, can't see that happening.


They hold still pretty good if you squish them gently with your fingertip.
 
Pearl Sutton
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Christopher Weeks wrote:

Pearl Sutton wrote:These are too itty bitty to even begin to see what they look like unless I got one to voluntarily hold still under a microscope, can't see that happening.


They hold still pretty good if you squish them gently with your fingertip.


But then they are very hard to ID    
They carry their driver's licenses in their back pockets it's hard to pick the pocket of a minuscule squished ant

:D

(I think I have had too much caffeine!)
 
greg mosser
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the approved technique is to get a couple in the freezer. they hold still pretty well after that.

edited to add: there are so many kind of ants. i did a collection/taxonomy project from one county in ohio one summer in college, and even ignoring multiple collection techniques, and probably dozens of species of ants because of it, i still ended up with 94 species, some of which hadn’t been seen in ohio in 20 years. but only ‘cause no one was looking.

but we probably shouldn’t be too surprised by a lot of diversity in their actions, even within a group thought to be small and common!
 
Matt McSpadden
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I was taught about nail polish remover on a cotton ball in the canning jar.... I feel like I'm playing clue :)

"When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind." C.S. Lewis
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greg mosser
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in college i used glass tubes with proper toxic gick. freezer is definitely the more environmentally friendly approach.
 
Carla Burke
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Pearl, right or wrong, my folks always called the tiny black ones 'sugar ants', because that seemed to be what they were most attracted to. I used that against them (the ants, not my kin), to get rid of them, mixing the sugar they couldn't resist with some diatomaceous earth. A couple teaspoons of sugar, a couple tablespoons of the d.e., mixed up well, and placed wherever they're parading around, so boldly. Totally non-toxic, irresistible bait, one & done, very little cleanup.

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May Lotito
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Those tiny ants always try to invade the house around this time of the year and they go for my flower pots. The come through small gaps around the windows as well as power outlets on the outside walls. Somehow they dissappear around summer but maybe because I move all my pots out when weather warms up.

Zone 6, 45 inches precipitation, hard clay soil

 
Ben Zumeta
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We get ants in the house around here during the wet season when soil is saturated and presumably their burrows flood. Of course ants all up in our stored food is not great, but in the soil they add 2.5x the organic matter per year of earthworms, can help control pest species, and aerate the soil.

This is all just my opinion based on a flawed memory

 
James Bradford
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I eat the ones that crawl around my bed.  They stop coming pretty quick.   A friend vacuumed them ...and that kept them away after a bit.

I have theory that if they cant recover bodies, they have to assume predator ...what ant wants to lure a predator back to the nest?

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