Getting rid of ants from raised worm beds with essential oils and mint leaves

Aquaponics mint plant used to drive out ants from a worm bin

Aquaponics mint plant used to drive out ants from a worm bin

Question:

How do I get rid of ants with Essential oils that won't affect my Worms, or can I ?


Answer:

Hello,

if you want to get rid of ants in worm beds you can do this usually quite effective with extra water as ants don't like to much moisture in their environment. Small amounts of essential oils should be fine as worms do tolerate many potentially harmful substances in their environment as long as they occur only in small quantities.

So I would suggest to try using small amounts of the essential oil you had in mind and see if this will drive the ants out of your worm beds.

Another interesting way to get rid of ants in a worm farm or worm bed is using fresh mint leaves and placing them on the surface of the worm bin. We did this last year to an ant infested worm farm and the ants disappeared within 2 days. We do have a big mint plant growing in an aquaponics system that is supported by compost worms as well.

The mint plant produces unbelievable amounts of growth and we used several branches of mint leaves to drive out an ant colony that had established itself in one of our worm bins. We just placed the mint leaves over the surface of the worm bin and covered them with a sheet of plastic which kept more of the mint essence close to the surface of the worm bedding. As i mentioned above the ants were gone 2 days later but the worms were not negatively affected at all.

Give it a try and please let us know if it worked for you.

Kind regards

Stephan Kloppert

Author of "How to start a profitable worm business on a shoestring budget"

Editor of www.worm-composting-help.com

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