By Mathilde Causse
It’s that time of year again, the time where all the bugs come out. Be that ants, doctor flies, bees, wasps, etc. Just recently I was in the yard, picking some flowers to make an arrangement for the office and I noticed some of the flower bushes had some leaves missing!
As you can see from the image, the leaves of this flower have been pretty much picked clean. Who perpetrated this heist of leaves?
Here in Utila they call them Wee Wee ants, they are also known as red ants or leafcutter ants, and clearly they live up to their name.
And I think I found their ant hill. Under the Jamaica apple tree in the yard there is a tiny mound of dirt with a hole in the middle. While investigating a couple ants came out to check the surroundings. They looked pretty red to me.
In Central America they can be pests to any agricultural land as they like to collect lost of foliage for their nests. Even for regular gardens they can be a nuisance, pretty obvious with what they did to the leaves pictured above.
And unfortunately they also seem to have taken a licking to a tree that sits right in front of the office.
They literally picked it clean overnight, one day it had leaves and the next it didn’t.
It’s a pretty sad sight, but! In darkness there is light! and the tree has already begun the process of growing back its leaves and flowers!
As mentioned in the beginning, this happens every year, the wee wees come out and start picking trees and flower bushes clean of their leaves. And every year those same trees and flower bushes manage to restore the damage done to them by the ants. And I will be trying to document their progress over the coming months.
There is also a hibiscus bush that has been affected by the resurgence of the ants.
A sad sight, but, it also gives us perspective as to how well these plants manage to survive during the time of year where ants and bugs in general are very active. They get their leaves stripped and then grow them back like it never happened. It made me realize how resilient plants can be.
If you are wondering how we deal with the wee wees, there are two ways to do this. One way is drenching the ant mound with an insecticide, basically flooding the ant nest. And the other is spraying the ant hill with an insecticide, from my quick research, they recommend Dominion 2L for the job. Now, these wee wees can have nests that extend deep underground, doing this once might not be enough to get rid of them all, this makes it really hard to get rid of them.
It is basically impossible to prevent wee wees from showing up, they are as resilient as the plants they strip the leaves from. So you could say the best way to prevent them is just to get rid of them all together. And as mentioned, it’s a really hard task to complete.
So! I will be keeping an eye on the progress and recovery of these two plants for the next couple weeks to see how well they grow back all the leaves and flowers taken by the wee wees. As well as keep an eye on the ant hill and the dreaded wee wees.