I’ve always wondered if ants were attracted to artificial sweeteners, or are only human tongues fooled? And if they were, since there’s no caloric value to artificial sweeteners, would ants just constantly feed off them and die because they’d be expounding their energy on something of no caloric value? If so, that’d be a really cool, non-toxic way to get rid of them!
So I devised this experiment. I took a couple of Q-tips, labeled on end with a black mark, and dunked it in Coke and Diet Coke. The Coke was the black mark. I then set the Q-tips outside:
After a while, here’s what happened:
The one on the left I moved over closer to the second one to take this picture, but in the process I lost all the ants… except for the one lonely guy sucking away. So this is pretty clear… ants don’t go for the Diet Coke, only the real, genuine sugar high-fructose corn syrup in regular Coke.
An aside: I did this experiment on my back porch. When I closed the door behind me, it locked and I was outside without my keys… or shoes. Good thing I was fully dressed otherwise. The good news is I had my phone with me so I could take pictures of ants sucking on Coke soaked Q-tips. The bad news is this experiment costed me $100 for a guy to come out and get me back into the house (which in itself might be subject of another post).