Hello For the past three years (life of the flowerbeds existence) we have had a severe ant presence in our flower bed (Calgary). It's a large sunny and mostly dry flower bed due to its location and sun exposure. Ant activity is present troughout the bed, however seem to center around plant roots? They swarm up when any work is done around the plant (pruning, weed pulling etc), or even when the plant is watered! I don't know a lot about ants but they seem to make the soil around the plants very sandy and plants and soil don't seem to be doing as well as they should. How do I deter such aggressive ant activity? There are no specific ant entrances, so my ability to locate and boil/drown the queen(s) are nonexistent. :( I've read that ants prefer "poor" soil and I do know that this bed is in need of some compost attention etc, however digging around in the flower bed is extremely unpleasant due to mass quantities of angry ants! :( ADD: Upon some googling I think the ants might be pavement ants... the flowerbed is right next to a very old paver-stone walkway, and there use to be a cement RV pad which we dug up, revealing hordes and hordes of ants underneath. Also our ants seem to generate "sand", like pavement ants.
