My hive has tiny black ants walking over it. Any ideas how to get rid of ants?
If you can find the ant hill you can use a granular pesticide to remove the ants from the immediate vicinity. One of the gentlemen in our local club recommends Amdro and for very small ants like you are describing to crush it in a ziplock baggie first to powder it and make it more inciting to the smaller varieties.
What type of hive stand are you using Marianne? Depending on what you are using there are any number of ways to deter ants with purchasable ant shields, homemade water/oil cups and remedies. Post a photo of your setup if you can, that will help get you loads of advice.
Thanks everyone! I live in Australia and ants are a big problem here, especially where I have set up my hive, but thanks to good advice bees are less stressed! I put Vaseline around the legs of the hive They are metal legs dug into the sand.( Metal legs to avoid white ants) I could not put water around the legs, but the Vaseline does the trick and sprinkling borax, which is toxic to ants but not to bees!
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We have lots of ants in my area but I never have any trouble with then attacking my bees. I saw something interesting on Youtube, it think it was the Fat Bee Man. He lets fire ants nests exist near his bees, he has the theory that the fire ants will kill & eat small hive beetle larvae as they try to pupate in the soil:).
We have a problem with ants too, a ring of cinnamon around the hive is the only thing that seems to work, they simply march over the bodies of their fallen comrades with every other solution we’ve tried (Vaseline, water tubs). We now buy cinnamon in bulk from Costco. 