I recorded this video back in December when we were having temperatures down into the high 30s at night. I keep my worms outside, and they were not doing well in the cold. They were almost in suspended animation, and were not eating much food waste at all. The uneaten food in the bin attracted a large number of ants, and I had to manually remove them from the bin before they killed all the worms.
They continued to come back however, so I made these “soap moats” with small tuperware containers and diluted liquid soap. This turned out to work pretty well at keeping the ants out.
To warm up the ants, I moved them to an area that got more sunshine, and placed the bin inside of a small greenhouse. The combination of the soap moats and the greenhouse got the worms warmed up and ant free, and they began processing much more food waste once again. When the weather warmed up I did end up moving them back to their location on the north side of my house, but kept the soap moats, and I haven’t had any ant problems since.
I really like this method of controlling the ant problem because it’s cheap, low tech, non toxic, and easy to implement. It’s quite effective, and the only maintenance required is occasionally changing the soapy water. The tuperware containers work well with the worm factory worm bin because of its legs, but if your worm farm doesn’t have legs, you can still apply the principle. My first worm bin composter was made from a simple rubbermade bin, and I had an ant issue with it at some point. I used the same technique, but instead of tuperware I simply filled a larger rubbermaid bin with soapy water, put two bricks in the center of this larger bin, and then set my composter to rest on the bricks. This also worked quite well.
If you have some techniques for controlling ants or other pests, I’d love to know! Comment on the youtube video, or hit me up on twitter @GoGreenCompost
