What do you use to stop ants from damaging fruit on fruit trees?

Question

What do you use to stop ants from damaging fruit on fruit trees?

Answer 1

Im country guy. i have been farming my whole entire life and the best thing that you can use is called sevin dust. You can find it in your local hardware store or even a store like walmart. However do not use the liquid kind. the dust itself is the best. it will not damage the crop and it is not harmful to humans.

Answer 2

Tree Tanglefoot

Answer 3

Sevin Dust

Answer 4

white wash the trunks,, put a good brand of ant bait about the bases,,  if you have just one tree use a pressure nossle to wash them off the tree daily. they just go after the ripe fruit, so try picking it more often.

Answer 5

spray tree trunks with gamexan, or 1% piretroids, plastic barrier are excelent non poison remedy, it is just a polyetilene bag wraped around trunk, it makes ants imposible to walk up

Answer 6

My grandmother used to tie small plastic bags around each pear.  It makes a funny sight, and it can be a lot of work (better done for large/medium size fruit).  The bag not only protects the fruit from ants, birds and squirrels, it also works as a  greenhouse.

Answer 7

It is not the ants that are causing the damage. They are attracted to something that is causing the damage. Ants will frequently take a huge interest in aphids and herd them as if they were "cattle" for the honeydew that the aphid secrets from sucking the sap from the plant. Some ants will go after leaves, as do leaf cutter ants, who live off the fungus that grows on their underground farms where they bring the leaf cuttings. They will generally rely on an easier source of leaf than to climb a tree for it. They may be going after some other insect that is a food source directly. Right now we have a lot of tiny, inch worm like caterpillars that seem to be falling prey to ants as I see them getting hauled one by one to some dark hole. Where you live and what tree crop your talking about will give more clues, but I suspect the damage is from another source than ant (alone). Send me more detail and more specifics and I'll help you sort it out. In the meantime, look for another insect like aphids. One clue would be seeing a sooty black smear that is the honeydew secretions that are getting moldy on the leaves. Look for tiny aphid colonies especially on the new growth buds. A lot of times it is made worse by too much nitrogen in your feeding program as well as not following guidelines laid down per crop in annual maintenance (like dormant oil spraying and fall clean-up). Drop me an email.