Need help w/ fire ants...

[Rogue 9]

Cypermethrin is good I hear. It's cheap, easy to use and if you get the main nest and the queen, you should take care of the rest of the xenomor... uh, ants.

THe one problem with that is that this could be a multiple queen colony, which would mean you'd have to kill all of the hills you could find, and make sure the neighbors, if they have ants too, do too.

Multiple queen colony? Is there such a thing? If there are two queens there are either two colonies, one colony that's about to split, or one queen will kill the other.

[Straha]

Cypermethrin is good I hear. It's cheap, easy to use and if you get the main nest and the queen, you should take care of the rest of the xenomor... uh, ants.

THe one problem with that is that this could be a multiple queen colony, which would mean you'd have to kill all of the hills you could find, and make sure the neighbors, if they have ants too, do too.

Multiple queen colony? Is there such a thing? If there are two queens there are either two colonies, one colony that's about to split, or one queen will kill the other.

No, with fire ants you can get (unless I am vastly mistaken [which I'm not]) multiple colonies that have multiple queens, and share food, tunnels, etc.

[Falkenhorst]

You could maybe go out there at night when they're sleepin or dormant and just dig a hole as deep as you can and see if you can root em out. Otherwise I would say do the same thing except just dig a shallow hole where the mound was and leave a garden hose running in it and let it really soak in deep and make the nest unlivable for em. Chemicals and shit are dangerous and they kill the grass.

[Gandalf]

Once, I was fighting ants, I don't think they were fire ants though. I got a hose and turned it up to full strength and shoved it down the hole. It got to the point where I got to see lots of eggs. I drowned them good.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Fire ants? Hate to say it, but your best bet is to vacate because you *will* lose any battle you fight with them, short of heavy artillary fire.

Fire does not work, it may burn a few at the top, but there are ten times as many waiting to replace them beneath ground.

Poison does not work, even if the queen dies, there are always several 'hopefuls' that immediately get converted to new queens as soon as they receive certain pheremones released on the queen's death.

Water does not work, the nests go fifteen feet deep on average. Unless you're willing to waste hundreds of gallons to get the ground saturated for fifteen feet over your whole yard, it's out of the question.

Digging, likewise, will not work unless you're willing to tear up fifteen by whatever the dimensions of your yard are (I'm guessing it will be several thousand cubic feet, total).

Even if you did find some way to eliminate the ones in your yard, it will last you, at most, a year before several new colonies move in and fuck you over.

There was a fire ant-nest outside my home in Nevada. The neighborhood kids, the neighborhood adults, and even the landowners threw everything they had at it for five years straight. Within a week, the nest would always be up and running again. And that was just one nest out of six or seven that were within a ten foot walking distance from my house.

Once again, I'd suggest learning to live with them because you aren't going to win against them, plain and simple.

-Damien

[Straha]

Once again, I'd suggest learning to live with them because you aren't going to win against them, plain and simple.

-Damien

AH COME ON! Where's the fight in yah? Where's the will to try everything at least once just to get a chance to hit the poor little suckers. Those poor little bastards won't know what the hell hit them if you just try the good ole SD.Net SMACKDOWN! Just wait till night, put on rubber golashes, dig up a nice sized hole over the nest, take a high-power water hose, point it down or towards the center of the nest, then turn it on, repeat so you can get a couple tunnels down. Then after that's good and done pour all the pesticide you can down that little pit, and THEN you take a match, and drop one of the water made tunnels.

Repeat untill those suckers can suck no more.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Yes, fire ants among other species will form supercolonies where multiple queens have distributed nests in separate colonies, think of it as an alliance with two or more nations. If your colony has this mutual pact going then rest assured, short of salting the earth you won't get rid of them since one colony will resurrect the other.

[mjn6172]

Fire Ants.

God I hate those fucking things. I managed to fall into a nest of them when I was about 10 years old. 15 years later and my arm STILL has scars from that little incident.

Your best bet is either going to be to call in the professionals or learn to coexist with the little bastards. The poisons they sell at home improvement stores are not going to be very effective with so many colonies around. You'll kill a few, but the others will just take them over and continue to piss you off.

I swear, an Fire Ant hill could be at ground zero at a nuclear explosion and there would STILL be survivors strong enough to rebuild the colony and piss off any humans who come through the area.