Fire Ants!

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

Fire Ants!
« on: Today at 04:34:44 PM »
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I was feeling pretty good about my Fire Ant annihilation program, until this last rain and until I read up a little on their biology.

I was killing them like I would kill bees. Evidently it works, but not as well as I thought it did. In the last two days I've treated no less than 100 mounds in my yard with a mixture of granules from two famous ant killers from Home Depot (I don't remember what they were). I disturb the heck out of them with a cultivator fork and then pour the granules on them. It seemed to be killing them fine until two days ago. The mounds I treated yesterday still had ants in them this morning.

As I understand it there are a good number of ants in a mound that are capable of becoming a queen and starting a colony on their own and there are multiple queens in most mounds laying up to 1500 eggs/day.

It's a wonder they haven't taken over the Earth.


Alan

[crashdive123]

Fire Ant baits may take up to a week to achieve colony elimination with the proper bait. Anything other than bait will seem like you are chasing them around the yard. The reason for that is that the colonies are large....very large. The mound that you see is sort of like an egress point for the colony. Think of it this way.....every day the ant foreman assigns tasks and sends out the workers. If you use something with a quick kill, at the end of the day the foreman realizes that no ants have come back from the egress point. He just assigns ants to make a new one (hence the chasing the ants theory). Baits will kill the entire colony, but it may take up to a week or more.

I hate Fire Ants.

[crashdive123]

Here's a little factoid about Fire Ants..... A Fire Ant weighs about 1/100th of an ounce. All of the Fire Ants in the world weigh about 10 times more than all of the people in the world.

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

So, do you have a bait preference? I'm going to town tomorrow.

Alan

[Phaedrus]

I hope they don't form an alliance with the Murder Hornets!:rambo:

[crashdive123]

So, do you have a bait preference? I'm going to town tomorrow.

Alan

There are two that I used regularly with good results. Advion Fire Ant Bait and Maxforce Fire Ant Bait. If you can't find those, most baits probably will work.

[Rick]

That right there is just ONE of the reasons I don't live in the south. One. Fire ants. They are on the list. The very long list. Sell the ranch, Alan. Fire ants are going to take over the world. Your only hope is to become a Yankee.

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

.... become a Yankee.

I'm pretty sure that is the Eighth Cardinal Sin.

Alan

[Rick]

Suit yourself. It's just a matter of time.

[WolfVanZandt]

Uh, Rick. Yankeeland is part of the world.

[Rick]

Yeah but we don't have fireants, pythons, dinosaurs, gambian rats, formosa termites, monkeys (not the primate kind anyway), nile monitor........I CAN keep going.

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

Yeah, but you've got .... Yankees...

Alan

[Rick]

A slight inconvenience I am willing to put up with. So far, Yankees do not burn me, bite me, sting me or eat me...so far.

[WolfVanZandt]

The South is like being in an Indiana Jones movie...What fun!? And what better place to learn survival skills!?

[Rick]

Uh, nope......

https://www.barnorama.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/6-12.gif (https://www.barnorama.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/6-12.gif)

[Rick]

This would be things going bad in Indiana. Unless you're dressed like a carrot, you're in pretty good shape.

https://media1.giphy.com/media/YGwNReSwzObrG/source.gif (https://media1.giphy.com/media/YGwNReSwzObrG/source.gif)

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

That old guy needs to quite playing around.. he might hurt that little lizard.

On the other hand, all I can think of with the other one is... fried rabbit, rabbit gumbo, rabbit sautéed with onions, BBQed rabbit, roasted rabbit, potatoes and rabbit, chicken fried rabbit, rabbit stew, rabbitkabobs, .....

Alan

[madmax]

We do have a Yankee Town. It's a nice place on the west coast

But they have fire ants and gators
...salt water crocs coming soon. Oh yeah then there's those pesky snakes.

[WolfVanZandt]

There are a lot of things I miss about the South...some of the people, storms, waterfalls, the Appalachians, I know where a lot of good restaurants are.

But what's keeping me away is summer weather and mosquitoes.

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

There are two that I used regularly with good results. Advion Fire Ant Bait and Maxforce Fire Ant Bait. If you can't find those, most baits probably will work.

I couldn't find either of those in the stores but i did see them online. I got some Amdro bait and tried some of it. We'll see.

Alan

[Big Bear]

One thing I most sertainly do not miss about Texas is fire ants, that and water moccasins. I was working hauling hay in central Texas on time, I was stacking bails on the trailer as we went down the field. The other fella threw up a bale that a bunch of fire ants had made a colony in, now this got them rather riled so when I reached down and grabbed the wires of tha bale to throw it to the top of the stack, my gloves filled up with angry fire ants. I don’t think I have ever shucked a pair of gloves so fast in my life.

[crashdive123]

I used to love fire ants when I was working. Now that I'm fully retired.......not so much.

[Rick]

On the list.