Last year, I got my first hive. It died… or to be more accurate, it absconded. The reason? Ants. I now hate ants like you could never imagine. I found ants in the middle of the year. I googled, I watched YouTube, I tried cinnamon… I tried everything I could, but before I found the solution, I had lost the hive.
Late in the year, mid October, I got a call. A friend of a friend passed away and had some hives in the yard. A beekeeper friend and I went to get them, and I came home with two hives. One strong, one…eh, not so much. One made the winter, the other did not.
Early in the spring, guess what I found. Ants. Again. This meant war. I had read about people putting moats of oil and such on PVC stands. I went to the shop, scrounged up some scrap lumber and an old ladder like contraption that was left there 9 years ago when I bought the house, and built a stand for multiple hives. My wife and daughter painted it with some old leftover paint.
I then went to Lowes, picked up some metal buckets, and planted them in the ground with the lip about an inch above ground. Filled them with used motor oil and plopped my new stand in the oil. Late one evening, I moved the hives up onto the stand. The hives moved about 2 feet, if that, as I placed the table as close to the hives as I could.
After several days, my bees have taken out the ants, and I can see no more of them in the hives, or on the stand. I declare victory. For my next stand, I think I am going to fabricate it from angle iron and weld it. I have a welder I got for Christmas one year I have been wanting to use.
