Mowing anthills

[S854]

I recently purchased a flail mower For use on our CUT. Our property has numerous ant hills (12-18” tall) hidden in our grasses/weeds/alfalfa.

Many years ago, as a budding 12 year old entrepreneur, I earned spending money tearing up my dads powered reel mower on our neighbors yards. The most vivid recollection I have from that time was of running over an anthill and spraying myself with ants which were kicked up by the spinning reel… I also recall it wasn’t a lot of fun wearing an “ant suit”…

The ant hills I’m dealing with today are considerably taller than the one of my youth, most of these could be seen and avoided... I’m worried about the one I don’t see.

Is my shiny new flail going to send ants flying in my direction if I’m unfortunate enough to hit one of these hills? If so, are there any recommendations to “plow down” those hills before they’re hit with the spinning hammers? (Running with the FEL just above ground level?)

I’ve read where I can encourage the ants to move by repeatedly disturbing their mounds (scraping them to ground level with my box blade)… so that’s in my future plans, but there’s always that one hill I don’t see hovering around in the back of my mind.

 

[K5lwq]

I just mow them over and don’t worry about it.

 

[EddieWalker]

I'm interested in what others have to say on this. I'm hoping to clear some land here in Texas that is overgrown with Mesquite, but also thick with ant hills. Right now, the ground is soft and I'm able to squish them down with the tractor. I have a 12 foot batwing that I'm planning on using, but I'm nervous about damaging it on the ant hills. I'm hoping that the loader bucket will knock them down, but I'm sure that I'll miss some of them too. I might build a drag to pull around that might help, but I have my doubts. I think that the drag will just go over the mounds and leave most of them there, or it will pick up too much "stuff" laying around and not accomplish anything.

 

[mrmikey]

I’ve read where I can encourage the ants to move by repeatedly disturbing their mounds

When I bought the place I'm in now there must have been over a dozen hills from 6" high to over a foot. I'd just spray some gas on the area (it was a lot cheaper then) dig them up with a shovel and mix them up a bit and light them afire stirring the whole time and then mix some ant killer in the soup. Not a one returned and grass grew great.
As for running over them with a flail, have at it.

 

[S854]

… I might build a drag to pull around that might help…

You just gave me an idea… my tractor has two “unused” attachment points directly under the FEL mounts (they’re the front attachment points for a backhoe)…

if I were to hang a strip of heavy metal (I-beam, railroad rail etc) from those points, perpendicular to my path of travel and suspended by chain just above ground level it might knock Down the hills before the mower gets to them… being centered under the tractor they couldn’t get run over by the tires… hmmm…

OR!!!

Maybe I’m overthinking this (I tend to do that) and I’ll “just run over them”…

 

[EddieWalker]

Where I live, I have red soil and the ant hills are not very big. I run over them now with my mower without any noticeable issues. I mow a couple times a year, so the hills haven't gotten too big.

The other property that I'm going to mow is totally different. The soil is softer, it's more loamy. I think it's easier for the ants to dig, but for whatever reason, the ant hills are massive. I wasn't even sure what they where, I've lived with fire ants here in East Texas for 20 years, but the ant hills on this other place are much much bigger. The neighbor said that when Summer hits, they become as hard as concrete. That has me a little worried. The neighbor might be exaggerating, but there are a lot of them to deal with. When I'm clearing the Mesquite, I'm going to take out as many ant hills as I can, but there will still be hundreds left to deal with when I mow.

If you do the drag before your mower, I think it needs to be heavy enough to actually do some damage to the ant hills. I think the loader bucket will do this better, but if you don't have a loader, that might be worth trying.

I also thought about bolting a heavy piece of angle iron to the front of my batwing so it hits the ant hills before the blades do, and it pushes the ant hill over. The weight of the mower should allow the angle iron to act like a dozer blade. Or something along that line of thought.

 

[duffer]

Your best solution would be to spray your acreage/field/yard with an insecticide a couple of times a year, that should prevent 95%+ of the ant hills from forming in the first place. I use Bi-fen IT (readily available online).

Before I started using it, I had 100+ ant hills on my 10 acres. Now that I use it regularly, I have maybe 3-5.

You can just mow over/thru them, but any kind of dirt will dull your blades in a milli-second.

 

[Williy]

I seen some place on youtube about an ant
killer using borax, water, sugar and a piece
of a waffle, mix the borax water sugar put a
piece of waffle in a plastic bowl first drill 4 holes
near the top of the bowl so the ants can get in
then pour some of the mix in and sit it near the
ants this is suppose to wipe out the colony

willy

 

[cqaigy2]

I seen some place on youtube about an ant
killer using borax, water, sugar and a piece
of a waffle, mix the borax water sugar put a
piece of waffle in a plastic bowl first drill 4 holes
near the top of the bowl so the ants can get in
then pour some of the mix in and sit it near the
ants this is suppose to wipe out the colony

willy

That works on the ants around here and the termites.

 

[workinonit]

I spray my entire place with Regent annually. No more fire ants, no more ant hills to tear up my finishing mowers.