Sammy, I finally gave up and put a handful of ant granules around the base of one rose. It was so badly infested that it you TOUCHED the plant lightly, ants swarmed all over. I could not handle it. I HATE ants!

The ants were gone by the next morning. That was over a year ago, and they have not come back.
In a like case, I would do it again.

Jeri

I think it may come to that for me, Jeri, unless I can find a product that will kill them , and not hurt beneficials or birds. I have such beautiful birds and many bees, that I want to be careful. However, I have a tall magestic Traviata that has ants running around the base, and in and out of an opening.

Conserve SC is supposed to be good, and I thought surely there was an ant killer that also would not be harmful to the environment.

SAmmy

Just a questions here...are ants detrimental to roses? I too have had ants swarm at the base of my roses but didn't think they hurt the roses.

Tammy

I don't think an anthill under a rose is necessarily a problem. Roots can maneuver around voids, and ants really improve the texture of heavy soils by gluing clay into sand-size particles. So if they weren't biting me, eating the rose, or protecting aphids, I would tend to leave them alone. Some species will hunt small worms and aphids on plants.

They are in almost every bed, and they are too near the house. They can hurt a rose, but that is not what I am worried about. It is the numbers, and they are carrying eggs (or something white.) Once the are in the house, it can be a true infestation that can even take experts months to get rid of.

I would like to lower the numbers, and kill some, but do not want to hurt beneficials like bees and birds.

I think that if I spray the ground with Sevin, it will kill the earthworms, and will make them dangerous to the birds.

Well, yes. But when I lean over to smell a rose, and it is instantly solid black with ants,
which swarm onto my hands . . . I just can't go there.

There are environmentally-friendly controls for ants, using bait and boric acid.
They are slow, but for the most part eventually effective.
However, I had tried that off and on for a good three years, and I could not prune the rose because of the ants.
You might say I had simply reached the outer limits of my tolerance level.

Jeri

That is where I am, Jeri. I have some Amdro, but wondered if there was something that might be safer to use.

Sevin is in fact highly toxic to earthworms.

Boric acid can be harmful to plants.

The truth is, anything that will kill ants will likely kill something else.
There are two things I cannot tolerate: Ants and Fleas.

Jeri

Perhaps the best thing to do is to soak the pot/ ground with water daily so that the ants will migrate to another area?

Ants are a pain - they nearly destroyed my Japanese maple and I had to re-pot my J.maple tree...now, no signs of ants in this tree.

I am fighting with the Oderous ants in my rose garden as well and bought some raid traps, 4 in a box, that have 2 types of bait in them, the ants are eating it up, so hopefully it is the right stuff. I have read on the internet that terro ant baits work good, although they are a little more expensive. Whichever you try, put out all the traps at once per colony, it may seem like overkill, but it works. I used all 4 to treat my one colony. Good luck.

I have had great success with those little cylinders. Let's see they are about the size a bit bigger than a half dollar. There is no poison on the outside of the cylinder..the ant walks through the cylinder gets the bad stuff on his feet and carries it back to the nest. They come about 4 to a package and are about 5 or six bucks. They have been a miracle for us.

Years ago my parents had termites..they had to have the house tented. Well then the ants came. They eat termites..not picky if they are dead termites. They had so many ants..they got in the food.

I finally broke down and sprinkled some Amdro around where the highest concentrations of ants were. We have been infested with them this year, and they have killed a number of my potted roses, including 4 custom grafted ones. Whenever the pot ghetto irrigation kicked on they would march by the armies to get into the pots. They literally would march along the blue line tubing and down the drip tubes into the pots. I think because of the drought conditions we have been having, they are desperate for water, and probably food.

I hated to put the Amdro around, because these were not biting ants. I had to put a stop to my roses being destroyed. They have also killed some areas of lawn near where the highest concentrations of marching ants were. I still don't know if my Belmont Yellow is going to recover, but I planted it anyway.

The Amdro has knocked the numbers back, but hasn't totally eliminated them yet, but I understand it can take a couple of weeks. It is supposed to sterilize the queen.

Usually the lizards keep the populations down, but I think the numbers of ants are so large that they can't keep up.

Sandy