I am the person who asked Linda the question about the ants. It sounds like we have the same type of ants as you.
As a stopgap to protect our trees until we can get rid of the ant colonies, we have used tanglefoot to stop the parade of ants up the tree. We wrapped the tree carefully so there weren’t any gaps between the wrap and the bark (a 15 cm wrap about a foot off the ground) and then applied a band of tanglefoot at the top of the wrap. We did it quite late in the day so there weren’t as many ants on the tree. It stopped the ants going up the tree and we removed the ants that were already there with a big paint brush. The tree is now ant free and we are hoping that some of the blossoms survived the ants.
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