that's easy to take care of. Just use a water moat and guard. It hangs from the shepherds crook, hang the feeder below the guard. You fill them with water and the ants can't crawl past. Chickadees & titmice love to drink out of them, too, which is really cute, so get the large size open cup!

They look like this:
{{gwi:822369}}

..and come in different styles. See:
hummingbird feeder ant guard. Any local bird watching supply will carry them.

it seems like that would be conducive to mosquito breeding (as ingenious as it is)

if we have a place we don't want ants, a line of vaseline usually does the job quite nicely. before buying a "mosquito breeder" like that one, I would just try blobbing vaseline on the wire for a couple of inches of length.

cup is too small to be a "mosquito breeder". It holds less than a cup of water, max. Besides, you need to clean hummingbird feeders every 4-5 days in GA at a minimum so the water is constantly changed out. Usually it's evaporated by that time, but the ants aren't bothering to try any more. I have five of them on hummingbird feeders, no issues. Switched to all my moats to larger cups this year due to evaporation actually.

Besides, if you have misquotes, that just means you need a bat house. LOVE my bats for keeping the mosquito away. Now if I could just get the yellow jackets to come out at night. :)

My husband solved the ant in hummingbird feeder problem by using axle grease (Quaker State multi-purpose grease and wheel bearing lubricant for those like me who did not know what axle grease was) applied like Satellitehead mentioned. Only advantage over vaseline is it lasts longer. We have not had any ants successfully get past the barrier into the feeder since we started using it.

We also use ant moats and they work great. No ants and no mosquitoes.

I remembered Walter Reeves addressing this issue some time ago. I googled it, and found the article on how to make a moat for a hummingbird feeder.

Here is a link that might be useful: How to make to make hummingbird feeder moat

please don't grease poles. It's potentially toxic to wildlife and birds can not clean it off feathers. Grease spreads and goes rancid. A fur clad animal encounters it and must consume it to clean themselves. Axel grease is made of nasty, nasty stuff and I am qualified to speak on the chemistry of petroleum based products. It also stinks for your soil. Why try and attract any form of wildlife and then use a system which has any chance of doing harm?? A water system is harmless and easy.

Birdwatchers Digest addresses the grease topic it in their Bird Feeder Don'ts, Cornell Labs does as well if I recall.

Love the Walter Reeves idea. How easy is that? I love simple brilliance.

Laylaa, I understand your concern. Just wanted to post and say we don't put the axle grease on poles. We put a small amount on the eye screw from which we hang the wire extension to hang the feeders for the ones on our patio. We also have feeders in some of our trees. We use extension wires to hang those, and the grease is applied to a small section of the wire. I haven't ever noticed it spreading. I didn't intend to infer the grease should be put on the shepards hook. That would be a bad idea.

I love wild life, especially birds and would never do anything to harm them. We have lots of hummingbirds visit and I have never seen any of them harmed in any way. That would be heartbreaking. It would be nearly impossible for any of the other birds to get the grease on them the way we apply it. But I will discuss your concern with my husband, so thanks for bringing it up.

I love the Cornell site. Have been a member of the Project Feeder Watch for years.

Laylaa, something else needs to be clarified on here -

Many breeds of mosquitoes need less than a drop of water to lay eggs. And some breeds of mosquitoes require less than a week to go from egg to flying nuisance.

While this may not apply to you, personally, because you're changing out water every 3-4 days, not everyone is going to be as diligent as you are at keeping up with it - we see this non-attentiveness problem with many invasive plants such as ivy, non-native wisteria, etc., and it's applicable to things like water pools just the same.

I appreciate the suggestion to make "water moats", but when considering the safe nature, negligible cost, the biodegradable nature and lack of ability to trade one bad insect pest (ant) for another (mosquito), I must suggest that the vaseline option is better.

I've enjoyed reading all the responses. Created a water moat with a spray paint lid and a length of copper wire. So glad I can now provide nectar for the hummers.

The points about mosquito breeding have validity, but using the small lid I believe total evaporation will occur every couple of days. It holds about 2 TBLS.

Now, hoping to look up from weeding long enough to see and delight in my hummers.

Thanks all.

Rosie, in Sugar Hill