The grubs you see are last year's grubs that have not turned into beetles yet. They stopped doing any damage about 8 months ago. Killing them now is like pouring money into Scott's coffers with no benefit to you.

The generally held belief around here for the past many years is that unless you have 12 grubs per square feet, you are doing pretty good and should not expect to see damage. Have you dug around the rest of your lawn to see if there are any grubs?

As for the ants there are ways to treat it but if you have children playing in the yard, you might want to simply discourage the ants from being there. Sometimes you can call them names and they will go away discouraged but usually that doesn't work. More seriously ants have to have just the right environment. Too much of this or that will ruin their underground food storage and send them away. Whether it is this or that depends on what the ants are eating. Can you tell where the ants are getting their food? Like are they climbing bushes or trees, entering a building, or carrying around pieces of plants? How much are you watering or receiving rain? Would you characterize your soil is rich and healthy or does it seem sort of blah? I know these technical terms can be tricky.

Is this new construction or an old home that is new to you? Is your lawn green and tall enough to be mowing at your mower's highest setting? What kind of grass do you have?

Thanks for your reply.

I have dug around the entire yard. Front, back and sides. I found about two grubs per square foot. The damage so far has been limited to about 10 brown patches for the entire yard with the largest patch being about 16 sq. ft.

I can't tell where the ants are getting their food. All of the ant holes are in the grass. They are not in one particular spot. Some are close to the house, some are far from the house, some near the road. None of them are climbing bushes, trees, or entering any buildings. They seem to be focused on the yard.

The house is about 25 years old. I would characterize the soil as fairly rich over all, but with some sandy areas closer to the house. The rainfall was pretty substantial last week. It rained about three days in a row, although I saw ants before that.

The lawn is green and tall enough to mow at the highest setting. I don't know the type of grass.

Thanks again.

The two things that usually spoil ant food storage are sugar and yeast. I know it sounds crazy to feed sugar to ants but not all ants eat sugar. For those that carry protein type foods down into their holes, molasses spray really chases them away. For the ants that eat sugar, yeast seems to chase them away. Unfortunately yeast is much more expensive than molasses and most people aren't willing to pay what it takes to cover the yard. However, you can make a yeast bait that attracts ants. Equal parts of table sugar and molasses with a small amount of baking yeast works fine. I'm not sure how to cut it down but I made some with 1/2 cup of sugar and molasses and a teaspoon of yeast. That seemed to make a lifetime supply of a gooey mess. I smeared a gob onto a piece of cardboard and put it out where the ants could get it but the dogs could not. It didn't happen immediately but eventually the ants found it and swarmed in. I saw the ants diminishing in number on the cardboard but still they finished it off and I had to reload. The second gob never got finished as the ants went away. Presumably the yeast does what yeast does and ferments sugars releasing CO2 gas. What that does to a food supply I can only imagine. Two weeks later I was ant free and did not use any poisons.

I have a house north of Toronto, Canada in the Oak Ridges Moraine. Lots of pine trees and very sandy soil. I hired a lawn care company to spread natural fertilizer as many chemical products are banned here for civilian use (although ok for farmers and golf courses). Three acres of lawn. For year one, things went fine and then the great grub attack happened. It seems that my healthy lawn was a feast for the grubs. In May of the second year after the lawn company fertilized, I had large 10 by 20 foot dead patches of grass. Then the ants came. I did some research and found that the the ants were eating the grubs. Somewhat like the movie Alien, the worker ants feed on the live grubs and then feed the queen ant. The result was about an acre and half of ants. As noted, chemicals are off limits here so the local plant nursery suggested using nemotodes. After bring the nemotodes out of hibernation and spraying them on the lawn, nothing happened. I then moved over to a variation of the molasses treatment described above by the contributor from San Antonio. The treatment that I found on the net was making a concoction of sugar and Borax (surprisingly still available at Walmart). The ants get tricked into thinking that the Borax is sugar, and when they and the queen consume it essentially scratches their innards with terminal results. This helped. However, it required apply spoonfuls of Borax/sugar to some of the bigger ant hills. And yes, Borax kills grass. Some have suggested that you spread a form of fine, ground limestone on the lawn as it has the same effect of scratching the ants. As an act of desperation, I then tried to find Diazonone only to discover that it had been banned in Canada and the US years ago. I also was refused a farmers license. And BBQ starter fluid didn't work that well. Finally, I resorted to importing some ant killer spread from the USA through Fedex. You can't buy it here, but its ok to import and use. That did the trick. The lawn is now beaten up and pathetic, partially due to drought conditions last summer. My wife has refused to allow me to turn it into a forest of white pine, or to plant other greenery better suitable for sand than grass - tobacco? hemp? peanuts? marijuana?.