By MONETTE TAYLOR | South Central Texas Edition

Wizzie Brown (right), Extension Integrated Pest Management (IPM) agent, answers questions about fireant control from those gathered at the small landowners workshop. -- Staff photo by Taylor

July 13, 2006 - If you’ve never seen or been bitten by a fire ant, you must be very new to Texas! There are very few insects that can move as fast and produce such a stinging bite.

Controlling the little fire ball was a topic that drew plenty of listeners during the June 14 workshop in Austin. Landowners with small acreage gathered to glean details from Texas Cooperative Extension IPM Agent Wizzie Brown’s presentation.

The good news is fire ants deter chiggers and ticks from making your property their summer home, Brown stated.

The bad news is fire ant bites are some of the worst for humans and pets. Brown began her presentation by detailing the enemy. There are five species of fire ants in Texas; four are native, but the worse is the red imported fire ant. This species has large eyes and are red and black, if you look closely.

While there is only one “queen” ant in each group, the other females are the “worker ants” and are considered sterile, noted Brown. The male ants are strictly for mating, and then they die. The groups of ants with only one queen are called “monogyne”, and the nests with more than one queen are considered to be “polygyne.”

The first “clutch” of eggs laid by the queen usually consists of only 12 eggs, but afterwards, the total goes up to 800 eggs a day. Before long, you are looking at between 100,000 and 500,000 ants produced by a single queen.

Queen ants usually live around seven years, but the worker ants only have a lifespan of around five weeks, explained Brown.

When you accidentally walk into a bed of fire ants, Brown said that the best way to get rid of the insects is to brush them off; don’t try to kill them while still on your skin. The bites they leave can be treated with a solution of half bleach and half water, and/or the use of antihistamines. (Topical creams can relieve the itch, too. If bites are not treated, the blisters caused by the bite can be very painful and can become infected, if scratched too much.)

Brown noted that most ant mounds are around 18 inches high and can be located in rotting logs, trees, under buildings or on open land. Strangely enough, the fire ants can relocate from one site to another almost overnight. In cases of flooding or heavy rains, the ants form a ball, with the queen and eggs in the center and move to relocate, explained Brown.

If a landowner finds only a few mounds on the property, she suggested pouring about three gallons of boiling water on the mound, and property owners can look for a 60 percent kill. To treat the individual mound, use a shovel and talcum powder. The shovel is used to turn the mound upside down, and the talcum powder keeps the ants from crawling up the shovel and onto the hands. 

Other home remedies that have been used to try to rid property of fire ants include the use of citrus peels and buckets of soapy water.

To determine if individual mound, or broadcast bait, treatments are needed, the landowner should “map” the area. The mapping helps a landowner to see just how many mounds they have. If you have 15 to 20 mounds per acre, broadcasting bait would be easier than treating each one.

The number of broadcast baits for fire ant control have increased significantly since 1999, along with the fire ant invasion in Texas. Various insecticides can be used, and landowners need to study the product application information to make sure the products are safe for their situation.

A bait insecticide is something that insects “sense to be food,” and they find the bait and take it back to the ant colony. Literature notes that the bait solution to fire ants takes longer than the individual mound treatments, but if you are inundated with mounds, it’s not practical to treat each mound, individually.

Some bait mentioned by Brown included Amdro Pro, Extinguish, Esteem Ant Bait and Siege Pro.  Again. Also, landowners can discuss their fire ant situation with the Extension agent in their county.