I like to put a humming bird feeder up every year.  It is so fun seeing those tiny colorful little birds zoom in...buzz over your head as they hover...then take a quick rest to eat sugar water.  Then they buzz off (literally).   If another bird comes around at the same time one is eating, they wiz around each other in greedy competition for my sweet sugar treat I put up for them.

However, as I went out to check the sugar water level the other day...I saw a long trial of large ants climbing up the metal trellis pole and crowding into the sugar water inside the fake flowers.   Some had drowned themselves in the sugar water inside the plastic flowers and some had actually gotten themselves inside the sugar recepacle and were floating dead.  The birds don't like this of course and it chases them away.   So..."Enough of this!"... I said to myself.  

I made a quick trip to the hardware store and spend good money on some well known brand of ant honey-killer, which I placed all around the base of the trellis and also on the metal trellis pole itself.  I put a strip of the "goop" along the sidewalk and on the little rip-off tabs they gave me, so they would run into this killer-stuff first.  The idea is that the ants take this stuff back to their colony and wipe it out.  Do you think this stopped them?   Not on your life.  The next day they had just walked past the poison and up the pole and over the goop, like it wasn't even there.  Of course they were in the feeder agan...drowned...swimming on their backs...clogging up the place where the birds eat...and chasing my cute little hummers away.

I said a few mean-unrepeatable word in my mind and told myself that I had to be smarter than these little beggars were.  I went into the house and found my packing tape.  You know, the kind that sticks to itself so well that you can't get it apart again and end up wadding it up and starting all over again.   Well, I wrapped 2 feet of this stuff "skillfully" back to back to form a tube, so only the sticky part was facing outward.   Then, I carefully wrapped it around the trellis pole, as it is shown in my picture.    Then, I went into the house with a plan on checking the pole a little later.

In an hour or so, I checked outside.   There were about 20 of these little guys congregating at the bottom of the tape.  They were all holding very still...which puzzled me a first, because they weren't dead.  Sandy said that they were pretty smart little guys and they were probably making some kind of plans to get by the tape.  But, with great joy in my own mind, I realized they were just stumped...stopped in their tracks! 

There has not been one of them that had figured out how to get by that tape in the last 2 days...so far.   If it rains, like it has been, I will have to just replace the tape again because this was really working.   It was the only thing I had discovered that would stop these ants...so far.  The birds are also back...joy!