Simple solution: place pot in larger container, and fill with water until it reaches the rim. Leave for a few minutes, and the ants will leave the medium carrying eggs, etc., and climb into the leaves. Hit them with ant & roach spray. Don't worry about the orchid -- wipe with a paper towel and it'll make the leaves all shiny. If you turn the plant on its side, the dead ants will fall on the ground instead of back into the pot. If you don't want to deal with all this, you can skip steps #1 and #2, and just spray the medium with the ant & roach killer. It'll accomplish the same thing, although some may escape death and just move the rest of the colony somewhere else. BTW, the pain from a fire ant doesn't come from the bite...it's from the sting. They bite for leverage to drive the stinger in, and not get brushed off easily. There's actually a worse sting from an ant here in Florida. I don't know the latin name, but locally in south Florida they're known as "bull" ants. They're mostly solitary, and you'll see them running up and down tree trunks. They're slender and about 1/4 to 3/8" long, black, with a red thorax (middle segment). I understand they're closely related to wasps. I've been stung once, and it left a horrific black spot the size of a half dollar on my leg, and took two weeks to heal. The pain is like nothing you would expect from such a tiny creature! -Bruce

I'd love 1 of them, have African potato tree -solanum macranthum cuttings now from mother tree -the bumble bees go crazy over the flowers - or blue eyed grass - Sisyrinchium angustifolium, known as blue-eyed grass, is actually a member of the iris family and so pretty, I'm just south of you in PBG and I have a lot of other plants, just too tired to look for all the names right now. Please let me know, thank you. Btw, April 5/6 Mounts Botanical is having their annual plant spring sale, they are in WPB, I'll definitely will be going!

Check out the discussion below re: Ants in orchid pots. The product that TampaArt recommends looks like what you need. Marion

I have that Phal, I like it a lot. I love all those spotted phals. I don't live in CA, I live in FL but same diff I guess. I find that almost all of my hoyas want to climb. If I leave them in hanging pots long enough for the stems to reach out about 2-3 feet they will attach to anything, even the stems of other plants, then up they go. Some even attach directly to the wall. This is generally okay with me, if I need to cut back a plant they have attached to I just remove them and redirect them. But sometimes it gets more complicated than that, like when they attach to wood slat baskets and totems that philodendrons are growing up. Once they get started there you can't go back. I have even had to repot some plants "in midair", because they were so enmeshed and tangled up with other plants that it would be impossible to remove them to take them down and repot. I just get a larger hanging basket, fill it halfway with mix, and use an empty pot the size of the older smaller one to make a well in the mix, then slip the old plant out of the old pot while still in midair, put it into the new one and fill back up with more mix and rehang. Its all I can do. I have a few repots I need to get to next week. This is a photo of what I call "hoya mayhem". This tricolor has gotten so tangled up with surrounding plants its basically reverted to the wild, LOL. Its one I am about to have to repot in midair. In th every back corner you can see a hoya pink solver and a camphoripholia growing up the wall and up the big grapevine in the corner. They have climbed nor roughly 8=10 feet from their point of origin.