this was just the thread i was looking for. my chickens are totally ignoring a booming ant population in our backyard. these ants are half black half red ants and they bite. our chickns are about 3 motnhs old bantam silkie cohcins and they just look right past the ants! grrrr.....
i got a dozen mix breed layers. they were about 8 weeks old when i put them under a light in their chicken coup/run. In the run, was a 2.5 foot high Thrasher ant hill. On a warm day, thousands would appear on the hill to sun themselves. My layers were still discovering their world when two of them wondered up to the top of the hill. I could tell the ants were mad, and i watch a couple crawl up one of their legs and bite the soft skin on its leg. the bird looked like it was going into shock! staggering and stumbling. Had it been a cartoon, it would have been funny but these were MY GIRLS! Now I was mad. The chicks were not eating them and they were showing a healthy sign of respect by keeping their distance.
two weeks passed. i treated with a safer boric acid powder and sugar concoction to try and kill. No luck and not quick enough. Ants still claiming their territory. Then, I backed off the feed a little and I'll be darn, they started getting even with ants. It took no more than 4 weeks but the girls won the war. The ant hill is no more, when they learned there were sweet morsels just under the surface, the hill did not stand a chance.
My 10-week-old barred rocks and black stars love ants. Here in South Louisiana, all we have are fire ants.
Yesterday, free ranging in the yard, they found a pile of leaves (a bag plucked from the curb in front of a neighbor's house and dumped amid some azaleas but never spread.) Three or four were clustered atop the pile pecking and scratching away.
I investigated and found them going after ants. I peeled back the top of the pile with a rake and uncovered the innards of an ant nest ... complete with hundreds of taste white ant pupae.
Soon, six pullets were working over the ants and the pile.
Currently, i'm planning on building a chicken coop where there's a large bed of ants - I'm assuming that this is generally ok, and the chickens can fend for themselves?