Moist soils have made conditions suitable for fire ant mounds to pop up in various places.

Here is some information to help you control them in case you see the evidence of them on your property.

Because fire ants cannot be eradicated over wide areas, the goal should be to manage the ants with a combination of chemical and non-chemical control tactics in order to eliminate fire ants in areas where they pose the most immediate hazard to people, pets and livestock, and to reduce infestations to "acceptable" levels.

Sanitation

As with any other insect pest, fire ants spend a great deal of time searching for food. That foraging activity can bring them inside buildings. You can reduce ant foraging around buildings by eliminating available food sources in these areas.

* Outdoor trash cans around schools, parks, and other buildings (right) should be emptied frequently during the day. Avoid leaving trash in them overnight. Keep the area around trash cans clean.

* Dumpsters and grease bins (at food service facilities) should be emptied routinely and the areas around them kept as clean as possible.

* Keep shrubs pruned away from the building so that ants can't use them as a "bridge" to avoid treated areas.

Identification

Adult red imported fire ants are reddish to dark brown and occur in five forms: (1) minor workers, about 1/8 inch long; (2) major workers, about 1/4 inch long; (3) winged males and (4) females, each about 1/3 inch long; and (5) queens, about 1/3 inch long. Fire ant mounds vary in size but are usually in direct proportion to the size of the colony. For example, a mound that is 2 feet in diameter and 18 inches high may contain about 100,000 workers, several hundred winged adults, and one queen.

If you break open an active fire ant mound, you typically find the "brood" - whitish rice grain-like larvae and pupae. These immature ants will eventually develop into workers or winged adults. Mounds constructed in clay soils are usually symmetrical and dome-shaped; mounds built in sandy soils tend to be irregularly shaped.

Reproduction

During the spring and summer, winged males and females leave the mound and mate in the air. After mating, females become queens and may fly as far as 10 miles from the parent colony. However, most queens descend to the ground within much shorter distances. Only a very small percentage of queens survive after landing. Most queens are killed by foraging ants, especially other fire ants. If a queen survives, she sheds her wings, burrows into the ground, and lays eggs to begin a new colony. In the late fall, many small colonies of fire ants will appear. Many of the colonies will not survive the winter unless the weather is mild.

Feeding Habits

Fire ants prefer oily and greasy foods. They also feed on many other insects and, from that standpoint, could be considered beneficial. To find food, workers forage around their mound often in underground tunnels that radiate from the mound. If the mound is disturbed, ants swarm out and sting the intruder.

Managing Fire Ants

Because fire ants cannot be eradicated over wide areas, the goal should be to manage the ants with a combination of chemical and non-chemical control tactics in order to eliminate fire ants in areas where they pose the most immediate hazard to people, pets and livestock, and to reduce infestations to "acceptable" levels.

Inspection and Observation

Because fire ants can be spread in new landscape material such as shrubs, sod, wheat and pine straw, check these items carefully before you purchase them or have them installed. If you are doing your own landscaping there is a chance you could get stung while handling fire ant infested items. If you find fire ants in plants, sod, pine straw or wheat straw, contact the supplier immediately.

Chemical Control

There are two basic approaches to chemical control of fire ants. An insecticide can be applied to individual mounds or it can be broadcast over a wide area infested with fire ant colonies. Individual mound treatments are usually more environmentally and ecologically acceptable because they use less insecticide and limit areas treated as compared to broadcast treatments, and they are likely to have less impact on non-target insects. Regardless of the method used, the objective is to kill not only the workers but also the queen, because she is the only ant in the colony that is capable of laying eggs. Always follow the label directions when applying any fire ant insecticide.

Mound Treatments

Individual mounds may be treated with a liquid or dust insecticide formulation or with an insecticidal bait. Liquid treatments may be done by rodding the chemical deep into the mound or by drenching the mound. To be effective, the drench must trickle down through the mound and contact most of the fire ants in the colony. Ants contacted by the drench die in less than 24 hours. Drenches are the preferred treatment when the risk of human contact with fire ants is high and the fire ant infestation must be eliminated immediately because of the health risks of someone getting stung.

High-risk areas include home lawns, school grounds, parks, and other areas frequently used by the public. Best control results are usually obtained in spring and fall when temperatures are between 70 degrees and 85 degrees F. Control with drench treatments is more difficult to achieve during very hot summer months because the ants remain deep within their mounds and are hard to reach with liquid insecticides. In the summer, drenches are best done in the morning or evening. 

The following procedure is recommended for drenching mounds. Following label directions, pour the correct amount of water into a bucket or sprinkler can. Add the prescribed amount of insecticide, mix well (without splashing), then gently pour the diluted insecticide over the surface of the mound. Apply the drench at a rate of approximately 1 gallon per 6 inches of mound diameter. At this rate, for example, a mound measuring 12 inches across would receive 2 gallons of insecticide drench. The amount of drench applied is more important than the concentration of insecticide in the drench. Thoroughly wet the ground to a distance of about 2 feet around the mound.

Sometimes the drench does not kill all fire ants in a treated colony. The surviving ants will construct small mounds within 10 to 15 feet of the parent colony. Several days after the application, search the area around the treated colony for new mounds and treat them with the insecticide drench. Keep children and pets away from the treated area until it is dry (or as designated on the pesticide label).

Ant baits also can be used to treat individual mounds. These baits are essentially a mixture of an insecticide and a food that is attractive to fire ants. Worker ants carry particles of the bait back to the mound and feed them to the "brood" (larvae or immature ants) and the queen. Even when the insecticide kills the queen, workers may be active inside the mound for several weeks before the colony finally disappears. Baits are somewhat slow acting but easier to apply than mound drenches. Therefore, they are best used in situations where many mounds must be treated, or when water for mixing mound drenches is difficult to obtain, or when the risk of human or non-target animal contact is low and there is no urgent need to eliminate the infestation.

The active ingredients in ant baits are rapidly degraded by high temperature, high humidity, and intense sunlight. The baits can be rendered ineffective in a few hours by these conditions. Follow this procedure when using baits.

* In the spring when ant foraging first starts to increase, you can gauge ant activity by placing pieces of hot dogs or potato chips in areas of known or suspected ant mounds. Watch for ants to start feeding on the food items and then apply the bait as needed. At that point, baiting is likely to be more successful.

* Apply the bait according to label directions. Sprinkle the recommended amount around each mound (not on top of the mound itself). It is best to apply the bait in the early evening.

* Many bait labels recommend that the material should not be applied within 6 hours after precipitation occurs (either rainfall or heavy dew). Moisture can lead to the bait’s attractant oils becoming rancid and less attractive to foraging ants or may cause the bait granules to lodge in the grass foliage and so the ants do not readily find them.

"Two-Step Method" - You can also apply a mound drench 5-7 days after baiting to kill of remaining workers more quickly.

Broadcast Applications

Broadcast treatments can be used to apply insecticides (liquids, baits, or granular insecticides) over a large infested area containing many fire ant colonies. One disadvantage of broadcast treatments is that they can also disrupt ant communities.

Although most people think of ants strictly as being pests, they are also a very important parts of our ecosystem. Broadcast treatments can result in an ant community changing from one that is dominated by native ants to one dominated by imported fire ants. On the other hand, in areas with very high mound densities, broadcast applications allow large areas to be treated quickly.

Areas of high public use may be protected by spring and fall broadcast applications of ant bait or a well-timed granular insecticide. One limitation on the use of granular insecticides (not granular baits) is that most of them require water (either from rain or by irrigation) to be applied shortly after the application. When rain is not expected for several days or in areas where watering may be restricted or not feasible, a granular insecticide may not be the best choice. If the area becomes reinfested with fire ants during the summer months, individual mounds can be treated with an insecticide drench or ant bait, although as noted previously control is more difficult when temperatures are high.

Indoors

The key to reducing the threat of fire ant infestations indoors is prevention, which means removing exposed food sources that may attract these insects. In some cases, fire ants may nest indoors, e.g., inside walls or partially under concrete slab floors. In those instances you will likely see soil and other debris pushed out around expansion joints near the edge of carpeting (image at right) or around water or other utility pipes. In most situations, fire ants are simply entering the building from an outdoor nest. In those situations, the treatment objective must be to reduce the potential for accidental stings as quickly as possible. Particularly the pyrethroid insecticides (products containing chemicals such as permethrin, cyfluthrin, bifenthrin, etc.), can be used in homes and public buildings to drive foraging ants outside or away from high-use or critical areas, such as kitchens, recreation rooms, patient rooms, operating rooms, or intensive care units. Select products that are specifically labeled for use indoors. Although baits work well for many ant species that invade buildings, they are not the best choice for controlling fire ants indoors because they are more likely to draw more ants inside and potentially increasing the chance that someone will be stung.

Ultimately, long-term control of fire ants that invade indoor areas can be achieved only by locating and then treating outdoor mound(s) using the methods explained above.

Chemicals labeled for outdoor fire ant control and their method of treatment include the following:

Chemical Method of Treatment

acephate (Orthene) Mound treatment

avermectrin (Ascend) Bait

carbaryl (Sevin) Mound drench

d-limolene (Safer Fire Ant Killer) Mound treatment. Used by organic growers.

fipronil (Over ‘n Out) Broadcast treatment

hydramethylnon (Amdro) Bait

(Maxforce G) Bait

methoprene (Extinguish) Mound or broadcast

methoprene + hydromethylnon

(Extinguish Plus) Bait

pyriproxyfen (Distance) Mound or broadcast

1. Always read and follow label directions before applying any insecticide.

NON-CHEMICAL CONTROL OF FIRE ANTS

There are some non-chemical methods available that can be used against fire ants; however, they may be limited in their effectiveness (or may be ineffective).

Hot Water and Mechanical Disruption

Hot water (i.e., 90° F) and mechanical disruption have been used in many instances. Results of some preliminary evaluations at Texas A&M University have shown that these treatments will kill large numbers of ants; however, satellite mounds formed by surviving ants subsequently appear. Thus, these methods can have a useful, but temporary impact on fire ant colonies in areas situations where pesticides of any type are considered unacceptable. Other non-chemical mechanical devices that disrupt colonies do not have scientifically-based test data to support their effectiveness. One potential downside to using hot water is that it can damage/kill vegetation in the general vicinity.

Grits

A long-standing folklore method of controlling fire ants (and other ants) has been to pour grits over the mound. The assumption in some cases has been that the ingested grit particles absorb water and cause the ants to "explode". However, fire ants (and ants in general) feed primarily on liquefied foods and their digestive tracts filter out these solid particles. Results of laboratory studies at Texas A&M University have shown that foraging fire ants collect the grits, but there is no reduction in the number of ants in the colony.

Biological Control

Research is underway to look at the use of biological control agents to control imported fire ants. These agents include parasitic flies and other ant species, as well as fungi and other microorganisms. These methods are not yet proven to be extremely effective by themselves, but can help reduce fire ant populations as part of an integrated pest management program.