NATURE'S LITTLE STORMTROOPERS
I notice that the proprieter over at
Kestrel's Nest applied the boiling water treatment to a
fire ant infestation. I also notice that he plans to watch the
spot for a few days which, in my experience, is a good idea.
Here in central Texas the boiling treatment usually takes at least
3 days to work effectively, although given the ubiquitousness of
those nasty creatures from hell all it usually does is drive them
a few yards away.
I learned about fire ants the hard way my first week down here
after I moved from central Ohio back in 1983. A fellow student
was giving me the 10-cent tour in his truck and we chanced
upon a woman who had pulled too far off the road after being
pulled over by one of Texas' finest. Since he had a FWD and
a winch, we pulled over and I quickly volunteered to crawl under
the front of her car to attach the hook securely. You guessed it.
I crawled right on top of a huge fire ant mound. I was quite an
entertaining site, apparently, since by the time I had my pants pulled
down to swat those evil little bastards off my vitals everyone was
laughing, including the cops. Well, at least I found out I wasn't
allergic to their stings, seeing how I was still breathing after several
hundred stings. (I wasn't worried much, though, seeing how I'd
survived several dozen bumblebee stings several years before
while helping a vet with the cows back on the ancestral family
farm. A helpful hint I'll pass on from the vet: raw onions rubbed on the stings significantly
ease the pain.)
According to the
Fireant FAQ:
Encouraging a
few fire ant colonies to abandon mounds in a yard is relatively easy. Even
regular watering can cause a colony to move. However, safely and
economically eliminating hundreds or thousands of RIFA colonies from
parks, farms, and ranches has proved to be nearly impossible. Remedies
against fire ants which are effective in a backyard will not solve the overall
problem across the countryside because no effective and safe measure has
proved to be economically feasible or sustainable on the grander scale.
Thus, while large-scale eradication isn't possible at this time,
at least temporary local control can be maintained, more details
about which can be found at the
TAMU Fireant page.
In their PDF document - called
Two-Step in the Spring - they detail the two most common
methods for handling fireants with insecticides, i.e. mound treatments
(e.g. Dursban, Sevin, Orthene, etc.) that are dumped on individual
mounds, and baits (e.g. Amdro Combat, Award Logic, etc.) that
are lightly spread over the entire yard.
As much as I don't like using poisons, I've successfully used
the second method. I spread Award Logic over my entire large
back lawn (a can about the size of a container of Pringle's
Chips will cover a very large area), the workers take the small
pieces of bait back to the queen, and they're mostly gone in about
3-4 weeks. I gave in and first tried this several years ago as I
would have had to boil more water in a week than the witches
in Macbeth did in a lifetime to even start making inroads.
Another thing they suggest is to join forces with your neighbors.
That is, all you're really going to do is drive the little bastards into
the next yard so you might as well join forces with your
immediate neighbors (or at least not brag to them about how you drove the
ants out of your yard at the next BBQ).
If you annually dig up or till a bunch of planting beds, then
you should probably treat the yard before you do so. It seems that
ten seconds after you make a square foot of soil more friable, the
fireants can hear a "NEW HOME OVER HERE!" signal being
broadcast.
One of my top time-machine questions (i.e. what's the first thing
you're going to do when you perfect a time machine?) is "Which
sumbitch or sumbitches do I go back and kill before they have a
chance to import these pests?" Unfortunately, there's no single
villain we can go back and torture for a good long time. The
history of these imported pests, according to the FAQ, is:
First of all, some kinds of fire ants are naturally distributed in Texas. When
people ask this question, they really mean pest fire ant species. Apparently
the introductions of pest fire ants were accidental. Perhaps the soil of potted
plants or ballast on ships arriving from South America to Mobile, Alabama
contained invicta nests. Exactly when is not certain. There were invasions
by two pest fire ant species. The first, the black imported fire ant from
Argentina (S. richteri), was barely established and spreading when the red
imported fire ant (S. invicta) arrived and proceeded to shove aside its cousin
(which now survives in Mississippi and western Georgia). The original
arrivals were probably in the 1920s or before. Professor E.O. Wilson, the
famous ant biologist at Harvard, was first to discover the invasion while he
was still a budding high school entomologist in Alabama.
posted by Steven Baum
5/1/2000 02:05:34 PM |
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