ANTS - Nasty I Have Ever Seen

[bindian]

Jim,
Sure looks and sounds like what jcliburn called them, fire ants. However the offical name of them is Imported Red Fire Ants. They have been marching through Texas all my life. In floods they will ball up the colony and float for days and latch onto anything "solid" they come in contact with. They come out after heavy rains and make new mounds. But now with all the drought, they keep coming in by the kitchen window.

Down here when we stop walking and stand still............we know to look what we are standing on and recheck every so often.

Definitely the meanest little critters. Dad used to put 7 and I think, 10 percent Sevin Dust on them. Talk to your local feed store or TSC. They should have some poison bait just for fire ants. You can buy the stuff everywhere here.
hugs, Brandi

 

[CrownHawg]

A "green" method is if you have several different mounds in you yard, take a shovel full from one mound and dump it on another mound. They absolutely HATE other colonies of the same species and will fight to the death. I have personnelly seen this work. May not get every one, but it will wipe out a colony.

 

[Dr_Zinj]

Another big problem with fire ants is they'll drive out all other species too, including the native beneficial ones.

At least with killer bees, they keep inbreeding with local honeybees and getting milder. Nothing else breeds with fire ants and they're just as much a curse as the first day they landed on U.S. soil back in the 1930s.

 

[MH8675309]

Boric acid. They'll carry it down into the nest and when it rains they're history

 

[Looking4new]

I have heard that corn meal works on ants, too.

 

[check]

We have carpenter ants and tiny little ants at the cottage. Every spring we use ant traps and poison, which only lasts about half the summer. A real muisance!

 

[jix]

Boric acid powder and 50% sugar/water in a closed punctured shoe polish tin.. the ants carry it home and they all eat it and cannot resist it.. BINGO the whole nest is killed DEDD! Queen, eggs and all. Guaranteed, and dirt cheap. non-toxic to mammals, birds, kids in small amounts. Works on any type of ant, except your father's/mother's sister.

 

[deerseeker001]

I will have to remember that for ants

Boric acid powder and 50% sugar/water in a closed punctured shoe polish tin.. the ants carry it home and they all eat it and cannot resist it.. BINGO the whole nest is killed DEDD! Queen, eggs and all. Guaranteed, and dirt cheap. non-toxic to mammals, birds, kids in small amounts. Works on any type of ant, except your father's/mother's sister.

 

[RollingsFarms]

Are the mounds sort of small and red-ish in color? Almost like a bowl with a hole in the dead center of the mound?

 

[RedNeckGeek]

For years I've used whatever insecticide is recommended for termites and poured a barrier around the foundation. I use a two gallon sprinkler can with the shower head removed so it just makes a stream, and that two gallons covers about ten feet. I wet about a foot of wall and a foot of ground as I go along. Works really well where concrete meets the foundation, as it gets down into the cracks where ants like to nest. I also hit where I store the garbage can.

Only problem with this scheme is that the insecticide seems to change from year to year. Used to be able to get one called Chlordane, and that would last a couple of years. Then it was Malathion, and that only lasted a year. Then it was OrthoChlor, again a year. I forget what this latest one is, but it's been on for six months or so and seems to still be working.