Disappearing pine trees

My wife gave me 6 Eldarica pine trees for Christmas. Noticed a couple of them were getting chewed on, so I suspected deer and soaked them with deer repellent and wrapped them with chicken wire. Two weeks later half of them were completely naked, stripped bare of needles. And covered with harvester (red) ants. I have tried the usual remedies such as diazinon, dersban, etc. Nothing seems to work on them except being sprayed with Raid. But there is a HUGE colony of these ants nearby and they seem to thrive on the typical granular poisons. Any suggestions?

sure....move the trees.

i dont know how easy this would be but that is what i would do.

Don't know if moving them would work. After they ate the three pines that were closest to the mounds, they made a trail (about 300 feet) to the other three and have started on them. Don't know if there is a place on my property more than 300 feet away from one of these ant colonies.

Can you figure a way to get them to eat some borax? A really good ant poison is just borax mixed with Karo syrup or sugar or honey. If you can find something the ants will eat that can be mixed with borax, you can put some plates out and goodbye ants. (Uh, you might want to cover the plates to keep other critters out.)

Steve

Deer love pine tree seedlings.

A product called "tangle foot" applied around the trunks of the trees. It's sticky stuff and is an affective barrier against crawling bug type pests.