Why don’t ants attack the bee’s honey?

No escape hatch?

You have 8 feet-wide swaths of ants in your garden?

Ants need to send out lone scouts to find sources of food. When the scout ant finds food, it fills its belly with it, and then returns to the hill while reinforcing the chemical trail to the food source that it left behind while scouting. Back at the hill, it shares its stomach content with other ants that will then know what to look for and then follow the chemical trail to the food source for harvesting.
Long story short: any scout ant that comes near the bee hive, gets killed. The ant hill does not even know the honey is there.

Well there are a whole lot of different types of ants out there…a lot of ants are both scavengers and hunters, but a bee’s nest is too much for them I’d think. Ants can obviously climb, but their main terrain is on the ground for the most part. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think ants are actually pretty selective on what they eat, and amassing food is dangerous enough that they won’t place themselves in unnecessary danger any more than they have to in order to find it. Although if something is placed high up that they want, if it isn’t protected, they’ll go for it, unlike a bee’s nest…you know bees get pretty freakin crazy if their dwelling is attacked.

Ants do attack hives. They’re one of the major hive predators. They’re going for the bees as much as the honey. Bees spend a lot of time sealing up any openings in the hive other than the main entrance with propilis to make the hive more defensible.

@thorninmud Huh, I’ll be damned. Ants are freakin crazy then.