Check your plants carefully for aphids. The ants may be farming them for honeydew. If that is what's going on, then fixing the aphid problem will help fix the ant problem.

I will check. They aren't crawling on the plants much above ground. They seem to be into the germination mix, or the fertilizer I'm putting into it.

Sounds like they want protein, not sweets. Look into using peanut butter as the base for a bait.

Rodney

Would you suggest mixing some Borax in with the peanut butter, or just straight butter to simply divert rather than kill?

BTW, my germination mix is very simple: 50% peat moss and 50% vermiculite. I would think it would be very low in nutrition if I wasn't adding fish emulsion to grow the seedlings.

I use Terro. Be careful with it and borax, both are poison for pets. Terro is a sugar base. They will carry it back to the queen and kill the nest. You won't need much. As they eat it up, put another drop or two out.

Thanks, there is no way our pets will get into this room, they'd have to get through not one, but two doors :)

If they after fish emulsion, they probably not sugar eating ants. Mix sugar, peanut butter and borax and use it as bait. This will take care about both sugar and protein eating ants, what ever they are. You also can find the path where they enter the room, just watch them from the distance without disturbing - you will see their moving "road". Then you can just spray the entrance(and alike places, to prevent new invasions. )

downplay- Sorry for the delayed response. Yes, I was talking about mixing borax with the peanut butter. That's why I said bait, not buffet. :) There are many different borax/peanut butter bait "recipes" on the net if you do a search.

Rodney

Funny how things work out, I did what Galinas suggested before the post because I already had the borax and sugar mixed. I thought why waste it, surely the sugar won't hurt anything. There seems to be a lot less of them now but I'm not sure if it is because of the bait/poison or because the weather has improved so much. It stopped raining and has been beautiful for the last couple of days. They might be hiding in the bottom of the seedling containers, I won't know until I water again. I think I'm gonna just go ahead and try transplanting them all. For some reason they don't seem as interested in my plants in the garden soil mix and the weather is good enough to put them out in my cloche during the days lately.

There is one sort of interesting development. I put out a sticky trap hoping they'd like the attractant which they did not. However, I placed it along the edge of the tray where they had a very active trail. There is a bunch of the germination mix now stuck along the edge of the trap. Clearly, they are carrying lots of it away. Why? I don't know. Would they want vermiculite or peat moss? Would they like it because of its fishy smell/taste and therefore the protein content?

Maybe I should find some other type of fertilizer. I like the natural aspect of the fish emulsion, fact that it is hard to burn plants with, and that the plants seem to really like it too. I think we have some chemical plant food somewhere in the garage for house plants. It should work OK if I dilute it enough. Maybe I'll try that for my next round of seedlings and see if the ants go away.

looks like, they picking up materials for building a nest ... Hope it is not INSIDE your room).

If the borax is in too high a concentration, it acts as a repellant and the ants avoid it instead of eating it or taking it to their nest where they can poison others. It's a case where more is not better. Here is a recipe for ant bait:

Ant bait - sugar and boric acid

Ant IPM

Sprinkle some cinnamon around. They'll leave.

More than once, I've had these little ants set up a whole colony inside a potted plant. If that's the case, you'll see a small stampede of ants when you water the pot, and then you have to empty the pot (outdoors!) and repot. If the ants originate from outdoors, you can find the nest by following the ant trail. Sprinkle a spoonful of diatomaceous earth into/around the ant hill. D.E. is basically chalk dust, except that it's particles are microscopicly very sharp, These particles quickly abrade insects' joints, and they die rapidly from dehydration. It's not poisonous, but by all means AVOID inhaling it.

Good luck!

Rick in CT

So far, the ones attacking my plants have subsided because I transplanted them. But, what I didn't mention is that we actually have two separate infestations in the house. There is another group I'm pretty sure is separate in the kitchen. I mixed two batches of Borax poison for them. They didn't like the peanut butter/honey but they went absolutely nuts for strawberry jam and Borax. I didn't see them but my grandmother said she wiped away "a thousand" of them this morning. We've killed so many by hand in the last few weeks she may not have been exaggerating. They seem to have slowed to a trickle of gathering workers today.

Thanks!