In an attempt to develop a control strategy, the first work examined the over-wintering behavior of the ants. This may not seem like attacking the eradication problem head on, but the approach was thought to give some basic information about the ants' behavior. A spin-off project which examined feeding and foraging behaviors unexpectedly took on major importance as it produced significant data having potential for BAIT development.

The feeding and foraging studies obviously required that living colonies of carpenter ants be maintained in the lab. It would have been too impractical to conduct experiments in live trees right away and lab work permitted year-round research. The first experiments were basic and geared towards determining the ants' feeding and foraging behavior; finding the right foods for sustained growth and maintenance of the colony were of primary importance since carpenter ants don't eat wood, they just use it for nesting. Dr. Fell's lab was in the thick of trying lots of "recipes" when, by chance, a member of the chemical control industry dropped by the lab for an unrelated visit. The visitor was surprised to see the ants eating one of the trial recipes because, to his knowledge, no one had ever been able to sustain a colony in the lab before.....when asked about it by the visitor, Rick called the material "bait" instead of "food," as an off the cuff remark, because he thought that the chemical company might be interested in funding future work.

Additional funded work indeed followed and revealed that ants were really liquid feeders and filtered out particulates during digestion. Dr. Fell fed the ants a variety of diets to find the most digestible by actually analyzing the internal components of the ants themselves. The whole concept of bait development became more tangible when Dr. Fell found the ants attracted to the best "recipe" when it was served in an jello-like medium. This, in turn, led to the notion that if the ants were attracted to this jello/food combination, why couldn't this attractive mix be laced with a poison??? This would truly be an effective, deadly bait, especially since carpenter ants commonly share their food and could pass the poison to one another if just one ant from the colony consumed the bait.

Dr. Fell eventually scratched out the idea for the Intellectual Properties office of VT and within 2 weeks got the go-ahead to pursue a patent. The scope and speed of the work was soon enhanced by additional funding from the pest control industry. The patent for the new bait is now pending and it was pure serendipity that this resulted from a project originally aimed at investigating overwintering behavior!