At that time I had a small feeder and, between it and the pineapple sage, I found myself having to fill the feeder every other day. So, I quickly bought another, larger, feeder. These have served me well for the past 2 summers. But, the summer sun in Oklahoma is unforgiving and the bright red and yellow plastic "flowers" on the bases of the feeders broke into pieces after a few weeks of use this year.
I never really liked those stupid flowers anyway. They were hard to clean and harbored black mold that I worried would be bad for the hummingbirds. So, after much thought I simply removed them from the larger feeder. This left gaping holes where they were. I tried using it like this. The hummingbirds didn't mind at all, but the water evaporated quickly and left a sticky goo in the bottom and all manner of insects crawled into the holes and got mired in it. It was a mess to clean up.
Then, I had the bright idea of filling the holes with hot glue and drilling smaller holes that were big enough for the birds to drink through, but too small for most insects. This worked great! I even painted yellow "circles" around the holes to attract the hummingbirds to the feeder. The circles were supposed to be "flowers", but I'm not very good at art and they ended up being circles instead. I doubt this was really necessary, anyway. I suspect the hummingbirds would have figured out where they were supposed to drink without them.
Here's a picture of my handiwork.
And here the feeder is ready to hang back up. Notice that the top has a "lip" on it. You are supposed to fill this with water and it will keep the ants from crawling down the hanger and getting into the feeder.
It didn't take long for the hummingbirds to find it after I filled it and hung it back up!
This is great! I've had the same experience and didn't want to throw away a good feeder. I'd thought of putting little corks in the holes and drilling through them, but like this idea better. Thanks for posting!
ReplyDelete