If I am going to sell Diatoms as a pesticide. I need to demonstrate that Diatoms damage ants. To test if ants are impacted by the Diatoms I will conduct and document experiments. These experiments will have a number of reoccurring characters. Today I introduce Ant Pile Four. Ant pile four gets first billing because ant pile four is inside my garage. Since, the pile was impacting a structure on my property I needed to act.
I discovered Ant Pile Four as I was sweeping my work area in the garage. The uniformly colored knobby product of their excavation spreads out on top of the surrounding area. In this case where the framing joins the foundation. Solenopsis mounds are very recognizable.
Time for, Diatoms! In this case since the tailings pile was inside I didn’t want stir it up and send ants out into the garage so I just squirted the pile. Then waited a few minutes to identify the area of active digging and I sprayed again.
Result: the ant behavior was influenced by the Diatoms. After applying about 75 grams in 4 rounds over 15 minutes I could not detect Ant activity.
(As of five days there was still no ant activity)