clear shiny spots could be aphid secretion. Im sure that can be a symptom of other things... but around here, this time of year, clear sticky spots on plants (and my fucking car every morning) is from aphids. Wooly aphids are tearing it up right now here. They love the heat and their populations explode during the hottest months. I would bet an aphid of some sort left that clear sticky business. The ants were probably getting on your plant to feed on the sugary secretion aphids leave in their trail. I should have said aphids bring ants. Other than using your plants to get to another location or setting up a colony in your root zone (container plants), the ants would not be there if there was not aphid secretion to feed on. Possibly they feed on some sort of sap in your area, and the clear stuff is sap, im not sure.
Outdoors aphids are not as big of a deal as indoors. If you do in fact have aphids, and you can spot them, you can just squash what you see with your hand. Try to manually remove as many as possible. If you had an overwhelming number, perhaps a pyrethrin spray. Pyrethrin, not the synthetics, the real pyrethrin... Everygreen, Monterray Takedown, Pyganic... No matter how many you kill though, if your area has them thick they will just keep coming back. Just hope your genetics are fairly resistant to them. Cooler weather is coming though and the populations will fall back.
Many aphids can go airborne. They stay on the leaves of many trees and can float in the air long enough to land on something they like. A few weeks back, you could walk under trees here and if you knew what you were looking for you could see them falling from the air like the tree was growing them.
Im not sure what is going down in the bay area right now... but right now we have wooly aphids. They look like a little white piece of fluff. Like cotton or some sort of buds falling from trees. With a closer look, they are aphids. They are actually pretty trippy. In the same way that a walking stick is. They look like something that crawled out of a swamp of toxic waste. Or maybe a creature from a Wes Anderson film.
