Pretty Cool.

That's a slow , time consuming & expensive way to get rid of the little red bastards.


Mike

Price?

Kinda like a trophy only on the end table instead of the wall.

One of the more satisfying things I've spent time in my life doing, was burning fire ants.


Very cool.

Beer cans. LOTS of beer cans.

Thankfully my wife mows the yard. I hire the house cleaners in return...

I'll bet the queen survived.

Cooooooool

If you don't have fire ants, consider yourself fortunate.

That's better than a Festivus pole. Like a christmass tree of death.

I've had very few fire ants the past couple of years. Must be because of the half ton of fire ant bait I've put out the past 10 years.

She just came in after mowing with an ant attack on her left ankle.

None up here my friend.

Get yerself some scrap aluminum and have fun!

We have plenty. Will send you some. Free shipping

Anodize it green and you'd be right in business.

our fireant problem doesn't seem to be as intense lately, like the last couple of years. don't know of predators/parasites or insecticides are taking their toll.

good riddance, what a vexation they are.

there is a new species of ant that has been introduced that wipes out the fire ant - and they don't bite humans

the down side is they love to mass inside the walls of houses and short out electronics.

I can't remember where they are but there is a pocket of them in the south and they are slowly spreading out.

found it

"crazy" ants and they are in Texas (also now Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida)

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Unlike its cousin the fire ant (also called the red ant), which it has displaced in several locations, the crazy ant is highly invasive. Moving into competitive territory, crazy ants aggressively compete for other species’ resources and establish dominance. Poison bait that works on fire ants is ineffective on crazy ants because the insects won’t take it.

“When you talk to folks who live in the invaded areas, they tell you they want their fire ants back,” Ed LeBrun, an invasive species researcher at the University of Texas, said in a UT Austin College of Natural Sciences video. “Fire ants are in many ways very polite. They live in your yard. They form mounds and stay there, and they only interact with you if you step on their mound.”

They have the 'crazy' ants in south Louisiana and they wreak havoc with electrical devices. From what I've read, they get in the electrical boxes, build their nest, and short out everything. Really bad about getting into houses, too.

we've had fireants invade the electrical controls of our well pump in middle Ga. they have to be dealt with in terms of termination.

like kudzu, they have to be eradicated. persona non grata and all of that.

I love my fire ants.

We've had fire ants get into the pump switch, also. The crazy ants will get into almost every electrical outlet, box, etc. Way worse than fire ants do.

She jumped in the pool when she discovered them on her.

Last year when the In-laws were living in Florida the FIL got hit in the right foot with a few fire ants and it had his foot messed up for about a month and a half.

Be nice to her and mow the lawn Ed.

Wow!! Instant silver Christmas tree!.

Had seen the clip before and liked it then. Coincidentally built a small charcoal fired blast furnace last weekend as a 'just cause' experiment and can tell you it melts beer cans like no body's business...but it's not a good idea to produce all of those melted beer cans in one sitting of beer drinking. Boy Howdy that liquid aluminum is hot!

For a minute I wished I had an anthill to dump it on but good Gawd; Fire ants and CRAZY ants, that crap has me welcoming a good freeze this winter. No thanks!

I used to live in central Georgia. Had fire ants all over the yard and I killed them all.

I noticed then that my dog and cat had all kinds of ticks.
I figured, fire ants must eat ticks.
So I let the fire ants return. Took 2 years and I had a dozen mounds in the yard, just like before.
Like magic, there were no ticks on the dog and cat.

That was pretty good sport, but then I moved to the mountains of North Carolina. We have no fire ants up here.
Can't say I miss them what a plague they are on central Georgia.

I remember when I was a kid in Georgia in the early sixties, they were bombing fire ants. Had some kind of fire ant poison, it looked like Grape Nuts cereal.

We would be out playing Little League in 1962 and a bomber would come over and you could feel the little pellets hitting your arms and bouncing off your baseball hat.

Seemed like a good idea but didn't work too well in the long run.

just saw your post on the fireant wars. that chemical sprayed from planes was called mirex. it was on ground up corncobs for bait. as long as the spraying went on, Georgia was free from fireants. we had them stopped at the river. but, the dept of Agriculture blinked because of environmental pressures from city folks about indiscriminate spraying (broadcasting). the abandoned the effort, and fireants immediately invaded and have since taken over. it has helped the chemical companies make a fortune selling retail level insecticides that might half work, half of the time.

Well, do they sting?

a buddy and i blew up a red ant bed in his Caliche drive way with propane.. his dad was not happy.

well, if Texas horned Lizards eat crazy ants, then we're good.

Let them drink gasoline.

If you pee on a fire ant mound every day for a week or two straight, they get pissed off and move. I have ridded my backyard of fire ants before with nothing more than the power of my pecker.

I think I read somewhere that fire ants take out just about every living insect with a certain radius of their mound - no other insect life (or maybe its just other ants) can survive.

One of the major causes of Quail population decline is that fire ants eat all the small invertibrates that quail chicks used to eat before they get big enough to eat grass hoppers etc. Those bigger ticks also fed baby quail.

I much prefer baby quail and ticks to fire ants.

Wouldn't that be "pissed on and move"?

yes. when we have fireants, we have far fewer fleas in the yard (and termites). with less fireants it does help the quail. but all of our quail has long since been depredated by feral cats, coons, possums and coyotes & loss of habitat.

I spray stuff in the house to keep out the bugs. I spray and cast other stuff outside to keep the ants away. Then I spray the dog-chit outa the damn weeds. If the flippin' EPA ever gets a whiff of my place it'll be a superfund site! They'll dig a hole big enough to hide an aircraft carrier and haul the dirt off to Alabama!

Stirring up the ant pile and pouring on straight bleach will zap them.

What really works IF you can get a small bottle of it is Mercaptan. One, single drop on an ant nest and they never return. This is the stuff that puts the "skunk" odor in natural gas. Back in the 70's I had a 22 acre piece of hay pasture that was near amok with endless mounds. I put one drop on each mound using an eye dropper and there are no ants as of now. If you use this, put on a triple set of latex gloves and store it wisely.

Diatomaceous Earth will kill most insects. A harmless powder that pokes holes in them and makes them bleed out.
It is inexpensive and harmless to other animals. I used it in my garden this year and had excellent results with it.
I dusted a couple of small ant colonies in the yard and they disappeared

When they stopped Mirex they gave them the southern part of the country.

Same with chlordane and DDT.Seems some folks thought is was a bad idea to kill out a pest that did not belong in this country,kind of like those pests that come across the southern border.

Lots of folks have been hurt and killed because of this.

Their idea is to bring in another pest that feeds on the first one,then before long they will find out they need to bring in another to take care of the first one.
Never ending cycle.

Diatom Earth really works. And it not harmful to humans or other animals.