Ant Moats to Keep Ants Off Hummingbird Feeders
“Some ants get into the sugar water in my feeders and prevent the hummingbirds from getting any. What can I do?” as Margaret Gill of Slaughter, La., puts it. Ants can create huge headaches for those who feed hummingbirds. A fix is to add a hummingbird feeder ant moat. That’s a cup that goes all around the hanger and contains plain water which ants cannot cross. This prevents them from moving further down to the feeder itself.
The best hummingbird feeders even have an ant moat attached or built in. Such moat with a water-feed requires an additional effort to keep emerging, but it contributes to keep on attracting hummingbirds instead of only ants. We advise you — highly — not to try to prevent ants by wrapping the pole in something sticky; there is a real chance that a freaking bird will get stuck to it. And please don’t apply pesticides — hummingbirds consume insects in addition to sugar water and flower nectar.
“How do I prevent ants from invading the dried meal worms on my bluebird feeder?” “What’s next?” asks Liza Peniston of Augusta, Kansas. We recommend that you hang the dried mealworms in a tray feeder from a metal hook, with an ant moat installed above the feeder. For as long as the moat is filled with water, ants will not cross it. You may have to try a couple of different stores that specialize in bird feeding. They’re bound to have some supplies handy to implement this configuration so your mealworms will not be compromised by swarms of ants. This simple solution could also do the trick for grape jelly and fruit bird feeders.
MD Imdadul Haque is the founder of BirdzFly, a research-backed resource on North American backyard birds. Drawing on years of independent study into bird identification, behavior, and migration patterns, he writes in-depth guides designed to help US birders understand the species in their own backyards — from common feeder visitors to seasonal migrants passing through.
