Fire ants

Only God can answer that one.

 

I visited my daughter and SIL below Kissimmee several years ago (they lived there 18 mos while he went to school) and the fire ants were bad in their yard. I went to a hardware store and bought bait/poison that was simply applied around the mounds and it worked very efficiently. Wiped them out. No more treatment was needed for as long as they were there.

 

Other Impacts of Fire Ants - eXtension

Kill them every chance you get.

 

We put our own poison down plus have the professional people come out but those darn things still come back after a time. When the human species is long gone from this planet, they and the cockroaches will still be here.

 

Where is Kissimmee, the one in Florida? The fire ants there must be a puny version of the ones we have in Texas. We treat them and they move over about two or three feet and start a new mound. Best we ever hope for is to keep them moving till we get them out of the yard into the pasture. And that is an annual challenge.

 

Hmmm, no more treatment was needed for as long as I was there, I should say.

It was like a 10-20 lb (or more) bag of poison which I used some and left the rest in their garage.

I've spoken on the assumption that the ants didn't come back. I'm interested to ask them now.

 

I think the one I usually buy is 7 lbs. I've used 6 bags so far this spring. Sometimes I change up to make sure they aren't getting immune to the same product!

I've also tried all the "wives' tales" cures for fire ants. They may work about as good as the commercial products -- all of which is not, or not for long.

 

Actually that's a different group -- PETI, People (for the) Ethical Treatment (of) Insects.

 

Sounds like black tie ants. They have multiple queens and can't practically be killed with powder or sprays. You can kill them if you use slow acting bait.

 

The only way they won't come back is if the yards bordering yours also kill theirs. They spread as new queens are born.

 

They moved to Kissimmee, FL during the real estate bust of 2008. There were many (probably half) vacant houses in the neighborhood. The house they leased had been vacant for many months as was a house on one side of them. When I treated their yard I also did the vacant property adjoining them. I asked my daughter if the fire ants ever came back, she can't remember it if they did.

 

I'm sorry to be so late getting in on the fire ant discussion. They are definitely a pest all over the southern U.S. Here in Alabama, just walking down the side of any highway you will likely find a fire ant under any leaf or paper wrapper that you pick up. In the northern part of Louisiana, where I grew up, the fire ant infestation didn't get really bad until the late 1960s. Prior to that, snakes usually occupied the side of the road during the summer. You always had to watch your step when walking fown a road because a cotton mouth could be hanging out there. Today, the ants have forced the snakes to retreat to other areas. The ants have also destroyed quail hunting across much of the south, since quail nest on the ground.

There is something about fire ants that I find fascinating and that is how their colonies behave after having boiling water dumped on them. A couple of hours after boiling water is dumped on a fire ant mound, you can see the survivors dragging the corpses of the departed ones out and piling them up. The mound will be there the next day, although smaller.

 

If you think that was fun you should try one of these:

 

I live about 15 miles from Kissimmee in the middle of orange groves and my lawn pest control company has its hands full keeping fire ants off my grass.

 

I like working a water hose down into the mound and watching them float away.