To my astonishment, ants get into my hummingbird feeders. Or at least they used to.

To reach the feeder they have to climb up a 10-foot wall, walk upside down across a four-foot soffett sofett sofit soffet sofitt, soffit, (all right, dammit, you try spelling that without looking it up! ), find and crawl up one of the brackets holding the awning to the soffit, crawl along the awning framework until they find a 1/8" thick wire looped over the top rail, crawl four feet down that wire, negotiating a tricky loop along the way, get to the top of the feeder, walk down that and find one of the feeding holes, crawl through the hole into the nectar... and promptly drown.

I invented* a rudimentary cure for this, see the photo. A couple of tricks are needed. Drill the hole in the bottle cap a bit smaller than the wire so the wire has to be forced through it. This gives rigidity at the wire/cap interface so the reservoir stays straight. Seal the hole with a bit of RTV silicone on both sides. Fill the reservoir with water about half full (so wind won't slosh excess over the sides) and then add a couple of tablespoons of cooking oil to float on top so the water doesn't evaporate.

Now the ants, suitably drowned, collect in the ant trap instead of the feeder.

I have two feeders up, the purple one (shown) and a similar red one. Between them I am going through three and a half liters of nectar [water/sugar, 4:1 by volume] per day!

tanstaafl.

*Of course I invented it. Being the incredible genius that I am, it is inconceivable that anybody else could ever have thought of this.

"You keep using that word..."