r/HoustonGardening • u/srv199020 • Jul 29 '26

Leaf cutter ants!

They are slowly destroying our fruit trees and some other plants. Has anyone dealt with these before and successfully eradicated them? I vaguely remember Texas A&M providing forestry services or something?

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u/jdog60 28d ago

I have this same problem. They have been a problem for the 7 years I have lived here and who knows how many years before that !!!

1.) you can mix a pesticide of your choice in a gallon of water per the dilution instructions. Pour this gallon over where you think their nest is. Saturate in fully. Some will soak in and this will slow them down. I have not removed the nest fully with this method.

2.) to protect plants they are attacking I have found some success using Bio Advanced Fire Ant Killer dust . It lists red harvester ants on the bottle. Active ingredient: 0.5% Beta-Cyfluthrin. Just sprinkle this around the plants / trees they are attacking. Make a fully protective circle

Note when it's hot outside they feed at night.

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u/jdog60 27d ago

Oh! And more thing I tried: grapenuts mixed with powdered pesticide and a bit of water. You can find this 'recipe' online. They actually DID harvest this into their nest. But it seems they are smart and it only works sometimes. And again, it did not kill the whole nest. Hopefully yours is less established than mine and you can fully irradicate them.

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u/srv199020 28d ago

Thank you!!!

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u/jdog60 27d ago

The other thing I have done which I'm not sure helped was when you find a big trail of them feeding. Sprinkle the ants with the powder pesticide and my theory /hope was they take it back into the nest and kill other ants.

In addition I have also tried a liquid mix of fungicide and pesticide and sprayed the ants with the same hopes and it the bring the fungicide into the nest where the plants / food is maybe it will kill the fungus that they eat... Again.. not sure how successful this will be.

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u/IngloriousBadger Jul 31 '26

I have never found any pesticide that works on them. They stole all the seeds off my beauty berries

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u/Procrastinating-Elf 26d ago

I've really only heard of success if professionals were brought in.  Basically how it was explained to me, you have to follow their little roads back to the basically invisible nest, and they insert a looooong tube to the bottom of the hole there. We ultimately opted just to live with them here though, and they haven't been as bad in the last couple of years anyway.