Bait Stations Along an Ant Trail: The Spacing at Which Discovery Time, Not Dose, Becomes the Limit

Liquid bait works only after foraging ants find it, carry it home and share it. This study models an 18 m trunk trail worked by 800 foragers making 14 passes a day, a station detection radius of 0.4 m, a requirement of 900 fed-forager trips to dose the colony, and a mean discovery time that grows with spacing. At 2 m spacing, nine stations are found in a mean of 1.5 days, 86.4 percent of foragers encounter bait each day, and the full dose is delivered 2.8 days after placement at a hardware cost of USD 9.90. At 9 m spacing the same dose takes 9.89 days, and almost all of the delay is discovery, not feeding: once found, even two stations are fed from by 286.8 foragers a day and complete the dose in 3.14 days. At 1 m spacing the total falls only to 1.9 days while hardware cost doubles to USD 19.80. The originated rule is to place stations at about 2 m intervals along an active trail, closer to the nest entrance where the trail is uncertain, and to judge a baiting attempt a failure only after ten days without a fall in forager counts. This study is simulated, not measured. SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED.