Fire Ant Control

It’s amazing how one tiny creature can bring so much misery to crops, animals and humans. Fire ants are a pervasive, devilish pest in many Southern states from Florida to California. They sting farm workers and livestock, damage hay equipment with their mounds, and have even been known to remove rubber insulation from electrical wiring.

Their sandy mounds are visible on the soil surface. Colonies with hundreds-of-thousands of ants are built under ground with a queen that lays hundreds of eggs per day.

Tracy Harris is Vice President of Sales with Central Life Sciences. He says many people use a spray to kill the adult ants, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

"If you use just an adulticide, like if you spray a permethrin or pyrethroid or something like that on the ant, it will kill that ant but it’s going to signal the rest of the ants, we’ve got to get out of here there’s a problem," says Harris. "And so, they will move the mound and they have escape tunnels. They’ll go 20’ and move a new house."

He says the best strategy is to use a chemical product that kills adult ants and sterilizes the queen, so the colony naturally collapses.

Harris recommends baiting as a control method.

"They’ll take that bait down and feed the colony with that bait. That’s what we’re doing to get it into the colony versus just spraying," he says. "You can do a mound treatment, or actually in citrus groves they’re doing aerial treatments, or they’re using a 4-wheeler and a spreader and putting their pound on the ground. It doesn’t take very much."