Anyone know of a readily available and cheap way to get rid of fire ants(other than gas or diesel)? I've tried the Spectracide mound destroyer which didn't seem to work. I've got about a dozen or so mounds in my 1.5 acre back yard and with a mobile 2 yr old son I need to get rid of these bastards. They hurt like a mother....worthless creatures they are!

Spectracide works
You just have to keep treating every mound you see, and accept the fact you can't kill them all

I keep a container on my riding mower so I can treat them as soo as they appear

Past several years of drought did a number on em here. But I doubt you want that tragic an action.

Move farther North.

Once they get started in an area, they are there to stay. You have to stay on top of it and put out poison. You'll kill that mound, but another will pop up somewhere else within a few weeks. Best advice I have is to just be diligent and kill off each mound ASAP before it gets big.

They are worse during wet summers BTW.

gasoline and a match

did you know there is yet another ant that is taking over the south and slowly but surely wiping out the fire ants? For now they are only in a few counties but they will spread eventually and they take out fire ants.

They are harmless to humans but they mass in huge numbers in the walls of houses or barns, and they love to chew up electronics and power equipment.

They are tough bastids from what I understand. You need something very fine they can drag back into the mound like Eliminator Powdered Insecticide

I believe Amdro Fire Ant Bait is the gold standard around here. Doesn't kill 'em by tomorrow but eventually poisons the whole colony.

http://www.amdro.com/Product-Chooser

Drought has done a number on 'em around here too, that and crazy ants.

Birdwatcher

I'll deal with the ants before I move any further north

We've had a mild and wet summer so that would explain the increase in mounds. I hate the things with a passion!

Gasoline is your friend

Crazy ants.

One morning I followed a stream of 'em in a trail fully 70 yards long running down the gutter on our street

But they do kill fire ants, and termites, and also appear to control ticks and chiggers like fire ants do.

Birdwatcher

yea from what I've read we may hate them more

but given I've run into ponds on golf courses more than once thanks to fire ants, I'm having a hard time believing it now

Amdro...a teaspoon next to each mound will do it. You just have to keep an eye out for new mounds.

One of my younger brothers sat down on one when when he was about 1 1/2 years old; sent him to the hospital

golf what is this you speak of?

in my younger days when I thought spending $60 to waste a saturday chasing a ball around was a good thing.

Strangely enough the West Side of San Antonio right where I'm at was one of the first places to get 'em. We've had them for several years.

Extremely mobile colonies. I've left a car in the driveway for a week and had 'em make a nest under the floor mat of all places. And if you leave anything edible out, they'll find it, even bags of dry pet food. Unlike fire ants too they climb, cant hang a hummingbird feeder without an ant trap of some kind.

The flip side is they are small, don't bite, and if you remove the food source they ain't usually a problem, leastways IME.

I'll take them over fire ants.

Birdwatcher

Don't know about fireants, but Golden Malrin flybait kills the hell outta our red ants when sprinkled on a hill......

Advion fireant bait. It contains indoxacarb as the active ingredient. Syngenta markets it, but it is a DuPont insecticide. I did a lot of the R&D with it for use in veggies and row crops. It works great for fireants.

Some guys have use baby powder i hears. An exterminator I know says the powder they use in homes is borex?

Baby powder does nothing, and Borax doesn't kill the Queen, which is the only real way to hurt the colony

With that few mounds, I'd have me a few low country boils and dispose of the boiling water down a hole you poke down the center of the nest. It has worked for me. I don't think they can run from hot water. I always thought that a steam cleaning wand shoved down the mound would cook them too.

There's some stuff you get at the co-op around here that's called acephate. It does a good job on fire ant mounds.

Nope. Gas is the stuff.

My pest control guy uses this. Get it online or at the farmers co-op. Broadcast in the yard and spot treat mounds. I tried EVERYTHING at Lowes and none of it worked. This stuff knocks the crap out of them.

Talstar

The active ingredient that you need to use: Fipronil. Read the label and use as directed will eliminate the entire colony.

+1

I had them bad when I lived in Florida. Tried a bunch of things. The one that worked the best was when I moved to Oregon. It worked. Not one fire ant since.

Here in Alvin I gave up trying on my own.
I got a guy that comes every 12-16 months and does ~3.5 acres inside my fence.

Absolutely no commercial grade treatment worked long enough to bother.

He first sprays then comes back in 2 weeks and puts down a granular mix.

$2,400.00 a pop. No ants, no spiders, no 'skeeters, no snakes, no mice NADA.

Before using this guy the crazy ants took out over $5k in electronics in 3 months.

Wifey, a cancer survivor, got bit by fire ants over 75 times at once. That was a rough 2 weeks for her.

I stepped out of my truck last week at my lease Before i could get to the camper I was bitten over 20 times.

Propane brush burner and 5 gals of unleaded was my revenge.

Red ants here are probably related?

One bite me once when I was waving a propane torch on um.

I dumped a jug of bleach down a mound, was all that was handy.
The bleach had a kind of a reaction and some sort of smoke came up from their every tunnel. That was kind of cool!

Didn't kill um all, but was worth the jug of bleach.

The ants secrete formic acid in their saliva. 100million ants, add bleach, reaction time.

Get a shovel full of fireants from a different mound and dump it on the first.

everclear, dump it down the hole in the mound and cover with a bowl or tub to let it soak and fume. I heard it works like gasoline, only not as bad on the soil. might be worth a try.

Interesting idea.

In Texas at least they've been forming "supercolonies" for at least 30 years now; basically a continuous carpet of fire ants with no clear delineation or hostility between colonies, new queens just setting up shop wherever after their dispersal/mating flight.

Might be the same in Brazil too where they come from as there their particular niche is to rapidly recolonize areas after the frequent floods. If it doesn't flood again they get taken out by the competing species, predators and parasites they have down there.

Birdwatcher

Gas can contaminate the ground water, and is nowhere near as effective as a good bait

If you don't kill the Queen, you haven't accomplished anything

Nuke 'em from space. The only way to be sure.

When I moved back to North Fl, the property we bought was over run with fire ant. Amdro killed them. Took a year, but they have not come back.

This right here works and is very cheap. From my experience, find the mounds that are the farthest apart. One queen can have multiple mounds.
The "worker ants" will go to war and fight to the bitter end, basically committing genocide. I didn't believe it at first, but it works. You can watch them killing each other above ground. Cool stuff.

Amdro. Sprinkle around the circumference of the mound. Dead mound. It takes a couple of days, but as you see a mound pop up, repeat. I had about 10 mounds in the yard this year. All done and gone in a week.


Clyde

I've used several of the over the counter bait killers and they seem to work, but another mound will pop up and I don't want to continually be putting it out. We've got chickens and guineas as well and don't know what the baits do to them so I stopped.

I read a while back about using an electric fence charger to kill mounds. I've got an electric fence on 24/7/365 and test it every day. So started plugging my tester in to a mound when I'd feed for a couple of minutes everyday. Only did it for a week. That mound is now empty. Haven't tried it on any others but I guess that 9000 volts for a couple of minutes does something.

Get a Queen into a shipping container so the rest of the colony follows her. Seal it up and drop it on the ragheads from ISIS. Serves 'em right.

When I lived in fire ant country, the most effective thing seemed to have a neighborhood fire ant day. All the neighbors would treat their individual mounds with Andro or whatever and additionally spread some other kind of bait (don't recall what it was anymore) with a broadcast spreader throughout your property. This helps prevent them from migrating back and forth between yards. Seemed to work pretty well.

Gas is by far the best revenge.......I like to pore it in slowly and let it stew a few minutes before I touch it off. Boom!!!!!!! The last one I did, I poked a 4' piece of re-bar in and loaded her up. be very careful and stand way back. Warning!!!!!!not recommended for rookies!!!!!!!

sounds like those crazy ants are alot further along than I knew

Embrace them

When I lived in Florida this was the only permanent solution. You can treat individual mounds, broad cast it over your entire acreage, or both.

Amdro is the only thing I have found to work consistently. Every time I see a mound I sprinkle a bit on it and they are gone the next day. Have had them get into the house a couple times and a flat can top full has then gone overnight.

Crazy ants DO kill fire ants! Since we became infested with them (Texas upper coast) we hardly see any fire ant mounds. Crazy ants are harder to kill even than fire ants, though. They do like to muck up electrical outlets, and will use an extension cord or a water hose left on the ground for a raised ant highway. I have to put my dog feeding dishes in a larger container filled with water to make a "Moat" around them when the ants are really bad to keep them out long enough for the dogs to eat. I've seen them eat dead roaches, and a coon I shot one morning was covered with them in just a few minutes after he hit the ground. Generally, I prefer them to fire ants, but they will bite humans, just don't hurt nearly as bad.

I finally found something to kill the bastards in one dose. I found it at our local Ag store called Talstar but has the same active ingredient.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cXHU80WPzoY

I live in Charlotte NC Area.....I have been invaded by Fire Ants.....I just Treated about 20 mounds with Charcoal lighter fluid, seems to work. we will see.....

Surprised nobody has mentioned a pound or so of tannerite..

I kersploded some fire ant mounds years ago , probably 20-25 years ago.

I didn't use tannerite



Mike

So how'd it work?

We use amdro or generic types of fire ant bait, to keep em out of the yard basically. Have to continually treat.

Recently tried Permethrin mixed with water and it seemed to be even better.

The drought here, did not kill them, only sent them really deep. As it has become a bit wet they've come back with a vengence it seems.

I have not tried talstar though, but have not seen the need as what Carolyn brings back from the store labeled for fire ants and or permethrin has been working fine so far.

Not sure I'd like crazy ants honestly, they are not that far from us, but having camped where they are I can deal more easily with fire ants personally.

It was between the permethrin an Talstar but a coworker who's also a fairly large scale farmer said Talstar would do the trick. Literally 24 hours after I applied it to the mounds all of the ants were wadded up dead in their mounds. You only use 1 oz/gallon so a pint even though it is $32, should last a good while.

Good information to know about Talstar. We use permethrin here so much since we have so many scorpions... I sleep on the floor due to my back, and I don't like much getting stung from them, they are a fair bit worse than the ants.

So I used it for ants too.

I will get some Talstar next time i'm at the feed store, just for ants to see if it works better or not.

All that does is makes them abandon that mound and move a short distance.

It's also contaminating the soil

If you don't kill the queen, you haven't accomplished anything at all

hm. Would think that fumes or the fluid itself would get down to the queen, the fluid and fumes certainly should kill ants.

Always amazes me that something thats a petroleum product, that comes from the ground isn't ever supposed to go back in the ground...

Fact is that anywhere we've spilled oil or fuel around the farm, comes back greener in a bit, since its like fertilizer in the end...

Certainly a bit of it in the ground for ants isn't a big deal to me at all. And I'm not anti environment at all. Just of the opinion that as long as things are not en masse its very often not nearly as bad as the sky is falling.

If it kills the ants....it's effective; Only difference is the cost. When I moved to where I now live, I had fire ants all over the place. When I asked my next door neighbor what to do about them, he came over with a bag of...............GRITS!
Plain ol' white grits. I thought he was funnin' me and said as much. He just proceeded to take the old broomstick he brought with him, punched a hole in the center of the mound and poured a cupful into and around the top of the mound. Three days later, the mound was dry and no more ants. Did that on every mound I found.
Asked him later how it worked, and he said the ants take the grits down into the tunnel and it swells up when eaten and kills the colony.
Has worked for me for 29 yrs. Cheapest cure I've ever found.
Say what you will, but don't knock it 'til you've tried it.
WILL.

Remember, gasoline contaminates groundwater at 1 ppm. So if you feel like contaminating 1 million gallons of groundwater with 1 gallon of gasoline, be prepared for the consequences.

Boiling water sounds effective, but how deep do these ant hills go?

I put the charge on the end of a piece of re-bar & pushed it down in the mound about 2'. No big boom when it went off , just a thump. It worked great because it got the queen.

As others have said , killing the queen is the key.



Mike

Very interesting. I"ve been on many fuel spills, where gas gets into the ground well before we arrive and in quantity. We put micro organisms on it to help, and I've seen well more than a gallon spilled in farming/ranching more than once. Yet none of those wells or the city wells have tested to have any issues...

I think its over blown personally.

Obviuosly folks strive to not do it, but it does happen and it seems to not be the end of the world.

A teaspoon of Amdro as mentioned earlier does it. It takes a couple of days but they'll be gone.

If they were worthless they wouldn't be on this earth! Wanted in a backyard play-yard, probably not!

Have you tried just calling an exterminator?


Phil

Greenlight Many Purpose Dust will kill them in 10-15 minutes.The formula has changed over the years,but is still very effective.
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Green-Light-Many-Purpose-Dust-1-lb/41529626