If they're farming aphids, foe. You'll see them carrying aphids to your plants...there's a nutrient-filled sugar/waste aphids release that ants find tasty. If they're colonizing so much its disturbing the soil, foe. This doesn't happen much, but I've heard tale of people ripping up under-performing plants to find a massive ant home under the plants. Never seen it, myself. 9 times out of 10 they're totally harmless and just mildly annoying.

Without a picture or a much more detailed description it's impossible to ID but if there is no damage to the plant then it is likely no problem. Most bugs in the garden are harmless or even beneficial. ;) Ants have segmented bodies while beetles have single segment bodies with a hard carpace. There are many bug pics on the web you can review so I'd suggest you Google "okra pests" and see if any of those are your visitor. Hope this helps. Dave

I just recently found this discussion due to my continued attempts to stop whatever has been eating my sunflower seedlings. I checked the plants thoroughly, and I haven’t seen anything that may be causing parts of the leaves to be eaten off. I figured it might be a chipmunk since I’ve seen one hanging around here, but the small black ants crawling up and down the stalks have begun to draw my attention. At first, several of the plants went more or less unaffected, but now all of them have at least a few bites out of their leaves. I‘m pretty sure the ants have something to do with it, since there were no bites on one until they arrived. I know that ants take care of aphids for their honeydew, so I specifically checked on the undersides of leaves (as well as the new growth) for aphids. The variety is Mammoth, if that helps at all. I’ve seen small flies land on them here and there as well, but I doubt they’d eat leaves. Also, pretty sure it’s unrelated (since it‘s only on one of the eight affected plants), but I just noticed a brown mass of one of the leaves with small worms crawling along inside it. Wondering what those could be?

Emma, Have y'all been dry? I get lots of fire ants in my raised beds when all the ground outside the garden is dry as a bone. Of course, I also get them in the raised beds when we have a ton of rain (which is rare these last few years) and the ground is wet. In those cases they move to the raised beds to get above the soggy soil at grade level. Hmmm. You're not pouring boiling water on a place where there's plant roots are you? For fire ants, I use an organic fire ant product (non-organic ones usually are not labeled for use in areas where edible crops are being raised). The one I'm using now is by Ecosense (which I think has been purchased by Ortho) and the active ingredient is spinosad. I used to see it in stores, but couldn't find it in a store the last time I needed it, so I ordered it online. For long-term improvement in the ant problem, add dry molasses to your soil. It increases biological activity in the soil and that makes the soil less attractive to fire ants and likely to other ants as well. They prefer poor soil with low biological activity. I only treat fire ant mounds in the veggie garden if they are the imported fire ants. If they are the native fire ants, I leave them alone because they attack the imported fire ants. Right now the only place I've seen fire ants in the last couple of months is on the edge of the garden right along the fence line. It isn't even raised beds at that lower end of the garden, but it is poorer soil than the rest of the garden. In all the raised beds that got a lot of compost added to them in late winter or in spring, I haven't had an ant problem....yet. The ants might be congregating at the low end of the garden because water drains downhill, so that area often has soil with a little more moisture than areas of the sloping garden that sit on significantly higher ground. There's some reason the ants are right where they are. I'm guessing it is for moisture or food. Also check those plants for aphids. Some ants farm aphids so you'll find them in the same general area together. Dawn