Recently, I attended the 2009 Turfgrass Research Field Day at Ohio State. The event, sponsored in part by the Ohio Turfgrass Foundation, reports on research findings in various capacities, especially in the use of pesticide trials. Shetlar's presentation was titled, “Control of the Turfgrass Ant, Lasius neoniger, on Ohio Golf Courses.” OK, at first glance, maybe such topics don't have a lot of bite, no pun intended. But when Shetlar’s waxing about them, they come to life.

"If you haven't had them," Shetlar said of the turfgrass ant, "then you're probably lying or applying way too many pesticides."

The turfgrass ant is one of the most common inhabitants of turfgrass in the northeastern U.S., Shetlar said. The ants build mounds on greens and tees, which can kill shortly cut turf, interfere with play and dull mower blades. You can apply insecticides with short residual activity and kill foraging worker ants on the surface, but this would only stop mounding activity for a few weeks because the colony survives, Shetlar said. The key, he added, is to kill the queen, the colony and the brood (larvae).

But you have to have an insecticide to get at the colony, where they're feeding underground. Let Shetlar explain.

"The ants store food in their nests. They do it in a very interesting manner. They don't just store food; they use living cupboards, which are called replete ants. These ants say to the other ants, 'Just keep bringing me food.' And they keep swelling up and swelling up. They sit there and just get fat. They become the community stomach. So when there's a shortage of food or the ants can't get food, the workers come up to the replete ants and say, 'Hey remember all that food I gave you? Cough it up.' Then the replete ants go 'blop' and spit up the food and feed the colony."

Amazingly, the ants can go up to four months in the fall and winter living off the replete ants, Shetlar said. Hence, another insecticide is needed to control them, rather than one with a short residual activity.

"We're beginning to adopt the same strategies the pest control industry has adopted [to control ants]," Shetlar says. "The pest control industry has always had this mantra -- if you're going to kill an ant colony, you have to kill the queen. We need to get an insecticide into the colony, get it the workers and then to the queen. What we're talking about is colony elimination, not ant activity elimination."

Shetlar says recent control tests using neonicotinoid insecticides have shown significant reductions in mounding activity five to eight weeks after application, which suggests the insecticides are either reducing food sources or they're slowing action within the colony to kill the brood and or/queen, Shetlar said. A fall application appears to reduce colony activity significantly the following season, Shetlar said.

"This is true colony elimination," Shetlar said. "You're not just fooling around with the workers on the surface."

The BugDoc not only knows best. He knows how to tell it best.