Bait Stations Along an Ant Trail: The Spacing at Which Discovery Time, Not Dose, Becomes the Limit
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Author: Aldred, William Alexander
Language: English
Subfield: Insect Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225699754
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