Ants also play an important role in the pollination of flowers. A few ants coming to gather nectar from the blooms is not a plant pest problem. But when you have too many ants in your plants, forming an expressway up the stalks of a plant, this is indicative of some other bug problems that need to be addressed. Ants themselves do not harm your plants. But ants are ingenious little 'farmers' that help several other bad bugs harm your plants.
Ants like to farm aphids, whitefly, scale, and mealybug.
These bugs, particularly aphids, suck the juices out of plant stalks. Then they pass 'honeydew', a euphemism for their excrement. The ants take the highly nutritious honeydew back to the ant colony for food. Ants protect these bad bugs from their natural predators, attacking ladybugs and their larvae that eat the aphids. The first step is to control the bad bugs doing the plant damage.