Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Getting rid of fire ants

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.