Ghost ants eat sweets, honeydew, dead insects, and live insects. These tiny, pale-legged ants are opportunistic feeders that shift their diet depending on whether they’re foraging outdoors or raiding your kitchen. Understanding what attracts them is the first step to figuring out why they’ve shown up.
Honeydew: Their Primary Outdoor Food
In their natural habitat, ghost ants are especially fond of honeydew, a sugary liquid produced by sap-sucking insects like aphids, mealybugs, and scale insects. Ghost ants don’t just stumble across honeydew. They actively tend these insects the way a farmer tends livestock, protecting them from predators and harvesting the sweet secretion they produce. This relationship is common among ant species, but ghost ants are particularly drawn to it.
This honeydew habit explains why ghost ant colonies outdoors often cluster near plants that host aphid populations. If you’ve noticed ghost ants trailing along the stems of garden plants, they’re almost certainly farming honeydew-producing insects on those plants.
Insects: Dead and Alive
Ghost ants are scavengers and occasional predators. Workers forage for dead insects outdoors, picking apart small carcasses and carrying protein back to the colony. They also feed on live insects when the opportunity arises, though they’re not aggressive hunters. Their small size (workers are only about 1.3 to 1.5 mm long) limits what they can take down, so they tend to target soft-bodied or already weakened prey.
This protein-seeking behavior is especially important when the colony is actively growing and producing new larvae. Developing ants need protein to grow, so workers ramp up insect foraging during periods of colony expansion.
What Ghost Ants Eat Indoors
Once ghost ants move inside a home, their diet shifts toward whatever is available, and they have a strong preference for sweet foods. Sugar, syrup, honey, cake, fruit juice, and soft drinks are all common targets. Ghost ants are notorious for finding even tiny residues of sweetness on countertops, in pantries, and around pet food bowls.
They don’t stop at sweets, though. Ghost ants will also feed on greasy and fatty foods. Crumbs, spilled cooking oil, peanut butter, and other calorie-dense scraps all attract foraging workers. This flexibility is part of what makes them such persistent household pests. If one food source disappears, they simply switch to another.
Their indoor foraging trails tend to follow edges: along countertops, behind appliances, and inside cabinets. Workers move quickly and erratically when disturbed, which can make their trails harder to follow than those of larger, more predictable ant species.
Sugar vs. Protein: Shifting Preferences
Like many ant species, ghost ants adjust their food preferences based on what the colony needs at any given time. When the queen is producing eggs and larvae are developing, workers seek out more protein. When the colony is stable and maintaining adult workers, sugar and carbohydrate-rich foods become the priority because they fuel the energy demands of foraging.
This is worth knowing if you’re trying to bait ghost ants. A sugar-based bait might work well one week and then lose its appeal the next if the colony’s nutritional needs have shifted. Rotating between sweet and protein-based baits tends to be more effective for this reason.
How Their Diet Affects Where They Nest
Ghost ants choose nesting sites partly based on food access. Outdoors, colonies nest in soil, under stones, inside rotting logs, and at the base of plants where honeydew-producing insects are present. They’ll also nest inside plant cavities and under leaf litter where dead insects accumulate.
Indoors, they favor kitchens, bathrooms, and other areas with moisture and food residue. Colonies are small enough to nest inside wall voids, behind baseboards, and even inside potted plants brought in from outside. A single colony can have multiple nesting sites connected by trails, which means food sources in different rooms can sustain different parts of the same colony.
Reducing What Attracts Them
Because ghost ants are generalist feeders drawn to both sweets and protein, eliminating food sources requires thoroughness. Wiping down surfaces to remove sugar residue, sealing food in airtight containers, and cleaning up crumbs promptly all reduce what’s available to foraging workers. Rinsing pet food bowls after meals helps too, since wet pet food is a reliable protein source for ghost ants.
Outdoors, managing aphid and mealybug populations on garden plants can cut off the honeydew supply that sustains nearby colonies. Trimming vegetation that touches the house also removes the bridges ghost ants use to move between outdoor food sources and indoor ones.