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Hello there. And thank you for joining me for another episode of the Ben’s pest control podcast. I am Ben sell the owner of Ben’s pest control. And today I want to talk about pygmy date palm trees. Now, pygmy date palms are trees that they love to plant here in Florida. I mean, we see them at absolutely a lot of houses. They’re a very common palm tree that is planted. They are smaller, as stated by the name pygmy, I do believe they can rise up to probably about maybe 10 to 15 feet at the most, I believe. A lot of times you’ll see them they grow in groups where you’ll have two or three at the bass that grow up from the bottom. But you might find it strange that a pest control guy wants to talk to you about a tree. And, to me at least this is an important tree because we see so many of them. And what you find is where the frogs now the prongs are the the tree branches. When they’re cut off, the leaves of the tree comes off, the palm frond gets cut. And the frogs that are left to the tree that are attached, stay there in a lot of cases and they start to go through the decaying process because the belief itself has been cut off. Now in the pygmy date palms as those frogs get older and that that stuff at the top gets old, you can actually pull it off and clean up the base of the tree as it as it grows, and have a nice clean looking base. However, a lot of people leave the stuff on the tree. And this prompted me to even make this video today I went out to one of my clients houses and they had white footed ants coming in through their sliding glass door. And about 15 feet away. There’s a pygmy date palm with three sections to it. And she said to me, they had just come the other day and trimmed the date palms. And I said okay, so I started investigating the day palms and pulling off the dead frogs at the bottom, the dead growth there. And it was loaded with ants. There were 1000s upon 1000s of ants, eggs, larva, adults, I’m sure there will probably be some pupa in there. All of the stages were there and there were tons of them. And now this specific date palm actually had three sections. And in all three sections, we found Antinous. So we started pulling back the frogs. And then we started having ants just pour out of the tree. And we were able to take our sprayer and spray the tree where those those frogs were and get hopefully control of the nest right then in there. Now strangely enough with the ants, we saw that they were trailing out of the tree and over to the lady’s house. And when we were at our house, we saw them going up to the roof and into a soffit vent. And I know in this community on the backside of her house, she has another pygmy date palm tree, they planted them almost all every house has one in the same spot. And I went behind her house to take a look and I get back there and she’s got three pygmy date trees there, there were one tree with three sections. And I started looking at the top of the tree and I’m pulling back the frogs, and bam, another nest. And I get to the second tree and I’m pulling back and another nest. And I was actually surprised I got to the third part of the tree and there weren’t any ants. But these things harbor ants. And now I want to actually take you back to the first pygmy date poem. So when I was treating the first one for the lady, I got to one section of the tree and I pulled back a section. And not only did she have white footed ants nesting in the pygmy date poem, but we actually ended up finding a nest of ghost ants, which most people refer to as sugar ants in Florida. But there were actually two different colonies of ants thriving in the top of this tree. So one of the things I will tell you about these trees, where you plant them, in my opinion is very important. Another thing you need to know about these trees, the frogs the live frogs have thorns, and you want to be very careful, especially if you’re trimming or doing any work because those storms will tear you up a little bit. You got to really be cautious of those storms.
The other thing is I tell people you don’t want That to touch your house. So, in today’s example that I was discussing earlier, the throngs of the palm that weren’t trimmed, we’re touching the roof of the house, and the ants were able to walk right across them, get onto the house, and then right into the softened fence. So you never want to let that touch your house. And you’d prefer to keep it nice and neat and clean. trim those trees, keep them off of structure. And my suggestion would be if you’re going to put in one of these trees, try to put it someplace a little further away from the house. Or if you buy a full grown one, and maybe it’s taller than your house, you could possibly put it closer, but keep it someplace where that tree hopefully isn’t going to interfere or be able to be used as a bridge to allow the creatures that like to live in it, specifically the ants that we talked about access to get on your house. Now in today’s example, the I treated two different trees with six, three sections each, so six different sections. And we did not see any roaches in the in the pygmy date poem. But we did find lots and lots of ants. And when we’re talking about the white footed ants, their colonies can have up to 2 million members. And I’m not sure we saw 2 million but I think the colonies were spread out a little bit. And we saw a lot of ants come out of this tree. So if you’re ever wondering about the pygmy de pomme, my suggestion is great plant. It’s it’s really, it’s really pretty for a palm tree, but keep it away from your structure. If you have any questions or if you’re interested in one of our free inspections, please check out our website at WWW dot Ben’s pest stop is or give our office a call at 772- 8781972 and we’ll be happy to give you one of our free 58 Point pest surveys. All right. Thank you and have a great day.
