General @ Wednesday December 14, 2005 09:16 pm by WunderKraut
Living in South Georgia you learn to deal with fire ants. The little bastards hurt like you know what then they get you. As a parent of small kids, one of my big fears is having one of them step into an anthill. WunderKid 2 got into an anthill that was hidden in pine straw. Before my wife could get his shoes and socks off in order to get the ants off of him, he had 20 to 30 bites. A huge dose of Benadryl and he slept for a day. It scared us to death.
Each year the fire ants and I have a running battle. My goal is to keep them out of my yard at all costs. This usually involves nightly anthill hunts with the largest container of Amdro that Lowe’s sells. My two boys know it as ant poison and they go hunting hills with me. Amdro works great. Usually by the next day the hill is dead. Actually, I am not naive enough to think that they all died, but rather that they just moved a few feet away. This is fine as the end result is that the hills are removed from my yard. If they do not die then at least I have run them to my neighbors yard.
I have been very successful at driving the ants away from my back yard. This is great because that is where the kids play. If I can keep the ants out of there, then I feel I have won a small victory.
But you must always be on the look out, especially after a rainstorm. Some of the largest mounds of dirt I have ever seen have popped up overnight after a rainstorm.
Not all my battles end in victory. There are three anthills in my front yard that defy all attempts to destroy them. There are also three or four on my side yard, but I never see the side yard and the kids are never there so that does not bother me like the hills in the front yard.
The first one is right outside our front door in a crack in the concrete. They usually build a nest adjacent to the driveway during summer and in the winter they abandon that nest and move under the concrete. My guess is to stay warm in the winter. Below is a picture of them trying to rebuild once again. Notice the black burn marks on the concrete. They are the result of my last napalm attack on them.
It does not matter what I do to this ant colony, I cannot kill them or drive them away.
Similarly, there are two hills that are adjacent to the curb in the front yard. I have been in this house for almost four years and I have yet to kill these two hills.
I put Amdro on them. I have gassed them. They have been frozen in the winter. Yet, they still live. They must be a particularly hard strain of fire ants. Each year I do battle with them, but they always win. At least they are not near where my kids play.
Tonight I took a picture of the little bastards. It was 50 degrees when I stepped on the hill to stir them up. They moved slowly, but even with temperatures that low, they are a thriving colony.
I need a more powerful chemical to attack them with next year.
Vengeance is mine you evil little bastards!
12 Responses to “Fire Ants”
My dad was a bug man for many years and says that Amdro is about the best thing you can use. He admits that it’s not entirely effective, but hasn’t ever found anything better. But he has suggested that for hill resistent to Amdro, you might get one of those kits that shoots the poison underground into the ant hill.
Depending on how badly you want grass to grow there afterwards, you could try soaking the nest in Kerosene, waiting several seconds to let it soak in, and then light it up.
At the very least, it would be a lot of fun.
Prechrchet
I tried that with gas on the driveway….that is why there are scorch marks. In addition to NOT killing the ants, I almost burned my house down….
Oh…
Use Kerosene, not gas….
Doh!
If you’re not opposed to using such chemicals, you can get one of those hose things that you can stick way into the ground and send bleach down into ‘em. That will kill the pile.
One of my co-workers made the suggestion to me the other day to pour used motor oil over them. Environmentally this is unsound, and probably illegal. But if it will work then I will do it. I’ve got a mound right now on the walkway to our front door. It’s december already–go into hibernation or something! Ants, mosquitoes, and gnats. I hate them!
Cullen:
Chemicals are my friends!
Bring back DDT!
No, seriously.
Time to buy an anteater. Problem solved.
Oooooooooooh Rob! You are so smart! I was going to say use clorox or tabassco ( did I spell that right?) BUT I would listen to Rob instead!
Fire ants probably piss tobasco. Then again, I wouldn’t want to be sprayed with urine, myself.
We didn’t have fire ants up in carpetbag country, but when we had pests, Dad used chlordane. Dad didn’t play friendly, for sure.
“Living in South Georgia you learn to deal with fire ants.”
Or you learn that you’re fatally allergic to them, which is yet another reason I’m glad I left Tallahassee. Seriously, that was the closest I’ve ever come to death, and if the paramedics had been a few minutes later, I know I would’ve died. Thank God I called 911 on my cell phone while I was still capable of it.
Anapylactic shock is an incredibly frightening experience: one second you’re fine, the next you’re sweating profusely, tongue swollen up, too dizzy to stand, breaking out in hives, having tunnel vision…my blood pressure was so low they had to start the I-V in the top of one of my hands. When I reached the hospital, they pumped me so full of antihystemines and adrenaline I didn’t stop quivering like a leaf for hours.
Wow, Dave. By now you’ve got an epi pen, right?
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