Hummingbird Feeders: No Waste. No Ants, Bees Or Wasps
New Ant Revision August 2024
OK. We all love hummingbirds. Watching them at your own feeder is tons o' fun. But constantly replacing spoiled nectar and chasing off bugs is not fun. Over a painful summer I have learned how to avoid all that. It isn't hard.
We live in New Mexico, and our main hummingbird here is the Black-chinned. In the monsoon season, we get an occasional Rufous or Calliope. This June they all disappeared. We had no hummers at all. I thought it was climate change, but it turned out to be bugs.
Ants are the worst. Carpenter ants and tiny sugar ants find feeders, spread all over them, get into the nectar and introduce bacteria and probably make it taste bad with formic acid. The nectar turns cloudy. After a time mold forms inside the ports. Birds stay away, and cleaning everything is needed--a real pain.
Then there are bees, especially honeybees. In hot times, when flowers shut down, bees resort to your 20% sugar solution as an easy meal. They crowd around the ports all day and all night. Hummingbirds can't get near the food. And of course there are wasps. Hummingbirds are afraid of wasps. They sting. One wasp who has adopted your feeder will keep any hummer at a distance.
Today I can report that I no longer have any of these problems. The solutions are easy and inexpensive.
Eliminate waste. Unless you have a large hummingbird population, you don't need large feeders. The typical feeders you see in stores are large. They hold so much nectar that after days in the summer heat it goes bad. You can tell it's bad if it turns cloudy from bacteria, or gets discolored. It may even have a fragrance from fermentation. Clean sugar water has no odor.
I buy feeders that hold only four ounces, or even two ounces. A couple of hummingbirds can drain these in 2-3 days, before it sours. Yes, you have to fill more frequently, but you aren't dumping a large previous fill that has gone bad on the ground. Making a quart lasts three weeks or so. A four ounce, saucer-shaped feeder is available at Wild Birds Unlimited. A two ounce, vertical feeder is available online.
By the way, my recipe for hummingbird nectar is one cup of table sugar into 4 cups of hot water (20% by weight). Stir, cool, pour into those flimsy, plastic half liter drinking water bottles and refrigerate until use. Refrigerated it lasts up to a year, or freeze it if you want. Label the bottles. There is nothing more shocking than going into the fridge for a drink of water and getting a mouthful of syrup! For photography, when I want the birds to come to my feeder and not someone else's, I increase the concentration to 25%. This is for temporary use, not as a daily diet. It can dehydrate the birds.
Ants. My previous recommendation of spraying a small amount of household ant-killer on a plastic bottle cap and threading it onto an S-hook (see picture below) didn't work very well once the summer heat domes began to infest our area. The chemicals were just baked to ineffectiveness. So I re-tried a water-filled ant moat. This worked until the water evaporated, and the ants realized that Moses had parted the waters for them before I could refill the moat, and got to the feeder every time. I tried moving the feeders, but ants have scouts everywhere. They find the feeder within a day or two. I went online to see what others were doing. Mint leaves! Come on. Spreading fragrant oils around the feeder. I don't think ants are that stupid. Walking past a little smelly oil is a small price to pay for a meal of high-calorie hummingbird juice. One idea really did look promising--hanging the feeder from fine fishing line. It's slick and offers little room to place ant feet for walking. I had special hopes for that technique. We have a lot of wind here in New Mexico, and hummingbird feeders blow to and fro, sloshing out nectar and blowing to the ground, no matter what sort of hook you have. So I tie mine to the ground with twine and a heavy rock. The ants take this anchor as an invitation to lunch, and I figured that if they couldn't climb the fishing line that would be the solution. Silly me. Within two hours there were hundreds of ants on the feeder and drowning in the nectar. Whoever devised that cure doesn't have sugar ants (yet).
All the sites I found discussing these solutions beg hummingbird-ophiles not to spread grease around the feeder. Grease gunking up feathers can be deadly to a little hummer. But grease works as an ant repellant--100%. Little ants, big ants, they can't get past grease. I use heavy duty grease, as it stands up to the weather better. Vaseline is worthless, as it melts at summer temperatures and just runs away. The hummingbird feeders stay crystal clear and fresh for days, until the birds empty them. The trick is where to put the grease. If you are using a metal shepherd hook to hang your feeder, just clear some grass, leaves or dirt from the base and put a small band of grease on the pole a few inches off the ground. Hummingbirds do not fly near the ground and are not going to contact the grease. (Just don't use red grease). If you are hanging from a branch, or from your porch, an ant moat is the key. Instead of water, spread a thin layer of grease inside the ant moat. Keep the opening facing up, and thread one of the plastic water bottle caps (see below) onto the hook and down to the level of the rim of the ant moat. This will keep hummingbirds, or any other birds, from sticking their noses into your trap. Rain water won't loosen the grease or wash it onto the feeder, because grease and water don't mix.
I use a variation on the "ant moat" design. Many feeders have a built-in ant moat. It is a depression on the top of the feeder that you fill with water. The ants can't get past it...or so they say. In New Mexico, the water evaporates before sunset. You can buy separate ant moats that the feeder hangs from. They are black, metallic and have hooks on either end. Water evaporates from these too, so I took a radical step, one you may not approve of, but let me explain. I spray a little insecticide, like Raid or Black Flag into the moat and let it dry overnight. I then hang the moat from a branch with the insecticide part FACING DOWN. That way rain or hummingbirds won't get into it, but the ants have to cross the insecticide, and they die. The scouts die one by one, never report back to the colony, and voila, no ants.
But suddenly, during the Southwestern Heat Dome and triple digit temperatures it stopped working. Sugar ants were all over the feeder. They laughed at my insecticide. I tried different types. No change. It turned out that the black metal ant moats got so hot in the sun that the insecticide was being cooked to ineffectiveness. But the solution was as near as the bottle of hummingbird nectar. Those half liter bottles have clear plastic screw caps. Take a cap and drill a small hole in the center. Make it a size that lets it fit snuggly onto the curved hook of the ant moat. Fill the clear plastic cap with insecticide and let it dry. It will not get hot. Then push it onto the hook and advance it far enough to be inside the moat's cup, once again facing down. It will not be anywhere near the hummingbirds in that position, but ants still have to cross it to get to the feeder. Or just put the bottle top on a S hook and hang the feeder below it. That worked.
Bees and Wasps. These guys fly in right to where the birds go, so poison is not a good idea. The best solution for them is a saucer-shaped hummingbird feeder where the nectar is completely held within the saucer. No bottles or vertical reservoirs. Hummers can reach the nectar with bills and tongues, but bees and wasps can't get to it through the ports. Since there is air between the port and the liquid, pressure cannot force liquid up the port to where insects can reach it. You can buy little port covers that hummers can penetrate, but they are not necessary. The only way a bee or a wasp can get a meal is if there is leakage between the top and bottom of the saucer (from rocking in the wind), of if a sloppy bird dribbles at the port. A quick water rinse will eliminate that. Designs with screw on reservoirs always leak. Unfortunately the two ounce feeders are that type, so don't expect perfection from these. Once the flying insects realize that there is no easy meal at the feeder, they will go away.
Four ounce saucer-shaped feeder (Wild Birds Unlimited) with black metal ant moat in upside-down position
Big saucer -shaped feeder with built in ant moat
Vertical screw-on reservoir feeder (not recommended)
Vimoa two ounce feeder (order online)
Plastic bottle top ant barrier on S-hook