16/month does not seem extreme to me. At 16/month I assume the OP has a small yard the takes about 20 minutes to treat. Amdro for fire ants cost about $20 for 2 pounds ad Home Depot. In my experience with cost for semi skilled labor it cost about 60 to 100/hr.

Fire ants can not be controlled in one application. Their hills must be treated when ever they are found. They are not limited to your yard, so it is unless you treat square miles for fire ants, they will be back

I have the orange flags that I keep on my tractor and mark the hills as soon as I pass over them. When I am done I take the Amdro and a water can and retrieve my flag.

I use Spectricide Fire Ant Killer which is a dust that you apply to the top of and immediately around the mound. What I've found though is that it isn't WHAT product or method you use since any number of things will kill ants, it's about how diligent you are in watching for activity and treating it as soon as you see it. Not when you get around to it but as soon as you notice it.

Fire ant research has determined that any one noticeable fire ant mound may have many entrances as well as multiple queens. The nests and burrows/tunnel coverage may be as small in area as your average suburban yard or cover actual acres. So.. it's not really a big victory to get rid of one "nest" since in reality, you've probably only wiped out one anthill among many. And as the poster noted above, you can't effectively treat everything within view (including your neighbor's yards without their permission) but you CAN reduce their numbers within your own space by keeping whatever product you choose within easy reach and being diligent about applying it as soon as you notice new activity.

Regardless of what method, be that hot water or hand grenades, you choose to combat the nasty little buggers, read and follow any package directions and warnings that may be included.

$16/mo not unreasonable and if you’re not committed to fighting the fight as described above, then worth the $

Is this the super dad who has never divulged his exact location???

We're all probably getting the same rain system these past few days, so there are going to be a lot of fresh mounds popping up. I've been waiting for this to happen for months (sigh, it's dry here). Here's something I tried at our last rainstorm in April. Two heaping tablespoons of Epsom salts and two tablespoons of dish soap or shampoo in two quarts of hot water. The only reason the water is hot is to dissolve the Epsom salts. Pour it all into the middle of the biggest mound. What that did for me was knock out a huge mound like immediately. The next day it was dead as a door nail; however, a new opening appeared about 5 feet away. I consider that to be equally as effective as any poison you throw at the mound. I repeated the soapy salt water approach and did not see where they had moved to, but then again it gets a lot harder to find them when there are fewer to find.

So why might this work? I did a lot of reading about ants back in the 70s and learned that many ants are an underground farming community. They send workers out to bring foodstuffs back to the colony. Then they do what they need to to grow various fungi and bacteria on the food, and the ants eat the fungi and bacteria. They don't eat the sugar, they eat whatever grows on the sugar. Fire ants are not sugar ants, but I suspect they do the same farming thing with their fat and protein collection. What the salt water does is to contaminate their food crop with magnesium sulfate salt (Epsom salt) and kill the fungi and bacteria.

That is my relatively non toxic approach. Feel free to try other salts or other ways to contaminate the mound. I want to try yeast as an organic approach. As a start I would start some bread yeast in warm sugar water like starting a batch for bread. Then put that into the 2 quarts of water and drench the mound. For fire ants, just plain sugar water might be enough, but yeast and sugar could throw another curve ball at them.

The active ingredient in the Spectricide Fire Ant product I noted is 0.25% permethrin which as I recall is a synthetic form of pyrethrin, a natural insecticide that comes from chrysanthemums. The label lists inactive ingredients as 99.75% of the mix which I assume to mean the dry powder that carries the active ingredient.

To be sure, I've used as few chemicals, both natural and/or synthetic, as it took to get my garden issues resolved over the last many years. In nearly all cases, I found a few holes in leaves and minor insect damage to be far more appealing to me than spraying some substance that would harm far more than the intended critter causing the damage. In fact, I've lost many plants because I wouldn't resort to chemical treatments. BUT there are certain instances where I will use whatever I can find, buy, or get hold of by some means to eradicate some little nasty that affects both my life and those around me and fire ants are one of those instances.

Please don't take this as an affront to your question or assume that I'm giving you a hard time but I've been fighting the fire ant war for close to 50 years now in one form or another and while I certainly respect those that try to be as organic as possible, there are potions that work quickly and solve the issue and those home grown potions that you can experiment with for eons and never get total or even partial control. If you have kiddos and I assume that you do, once one of them comes in squalling covered in fire ants and you have to be party to the misery that follows, you too may decide that slow acting organics may not be the best answer to this specific problem. I've tried it about all the ways possible, both organic and chemical and finally decided that this isn't the typical pest that you can kill half way and be done with it.

There are products that contain 'spinosad' as I recall that are also listed for fire ants and at one point, I believe that the active ingredient was in the organic spectrum of ingredients. I cannot vouch for the product(s) however since quite honestly, I use so little of what I already have in that one container on the shelf that I'll probably be ant food myself before I run out. ;)

Geez. Just sprinkle Amdro (or Spectracide, or whatever) and move on. This is NOT a hard or expensive or health-threatening problem. I'd suggest to your kids that they not crouch down and lick up the bait. Do you know for sure what insecticide this pest control company would use? Beware. Amdro and Spectracide is kid and pet friendly, and you just put it where you have ants - not all over the lawn.

Amdro bait. Read all of the directions, read them again, follow the directions carefully, and walk away.

The ants will collect all of the granules within a few moments and take it deep into the guts of their nest chambers. If you really think that boiling water or a contact pesticide will work, you don't understand how huge a fire ant network is.

Down to the country store where all the loafers gather,they say cheap whiskey and sugar is all it take's to get rid of fire ants. Pour the whiskey in the mound then sprinkle sugar around the mound. When the ants become drunk they will chunk oneanother to death with granules of sugar. Personally,I subscribe to something quit different. How many know of or ever seen Red Hearvester Ants? They were common in Texas half a century ago but were eradicated by the government using our tax dollars under the guise of combating fire ants. They spread tons of poison from retired WWII cargo planes. The poison made a dent in fire ants but almost completely wiped out Red Harvesters. Another Texas icon I'll bet everyone has heard of but few have saw is Horned Toads. Horn Toads were abundent until Red Harvesters, their primary food source were eradicated by government bozos with taxpayer funded poisoning. Harvesters are far less prolific than fire ants but after government moved on to wasting money on other worthless ventures,Harvesters s-l-ow-l-y began re-populating. Though it took several years,Harvesters begin to re-appear on the High Plains where few people live to broadcast fire ant bait. Horned Toads are now re-appearing on the High Plains. When Harvester population tip's the scale,fire ants decline. In N. Central Tx,the few places that have used methods I'm about to describe,fire ant population fell dramaticly. No bait is broadcast,individual mound treatment only,and then only at prescribed times. The prescribed time is following rain when fresh mound appears. When is bright and daytime temperatures are hot,treatment should be done before 10am. Following rain,eggs and reproductive ants are moved from deep in ground to fresh mound overnight where they remain until soil warm's. As soil drain's and warms,eggs and reproductive are moved below ground where moisture and temperature is optimum. If air cools and sky overcasts,movement below may not occur or if they go below then weather and sky cools,they may come back to surface the same day. Kicking a mound open will tell you what other mounds look like. You are primarily trying to kill reproductives and destroy eggs. Hot water was mentioned in a couple of earlier posts. Hot water will kill an elephant,it will certainly kill ants so it's a quick solution for a single mound 6 feet from the kitchen door. To treat several mounds,I suggest using any insecticide listed for ants in a pump up garden sprayer. Dilute as instructed on label and set noozle to fine stream. Do not disturb mound,just puncture mound with stream and inject 1/2 oz mixture witout increasing size of hole. For a fist size mound,that's all it needs. For a 12" diameter mound,make 3 or 4 evenly spaced holes,injecting 1/2 oz in each. Bigger mounds need additional injections. Opening a treated mound the next day will reveal total destruction within. Only treat mounds when eggs and reproductive are obvious,don't mess with them otherwise. Most treatments will occur in spring and fall but some years a mild winter affords opportunity. The quart of insecticide concentrate many will use to soak their intire yard killing benificials and ants alike will treat an acre for 4 or 5 years without killing benificials in the act,not to mention the kids and dogs. Don't forget,if you are lucky enough to have a colony of harvesters,protect them and they will pitch in to help rid your place of fire ants.

We have had great success using beneficial nematodes from The Natural Gardener in Austin. Organic Fire Ant Control

I wasn't sure klem was going to have a point, but that is a very interesting approach. Rather than spray a mist of insecticide over the top, he basically injects a small drench inside the mound.

texanjana, Beneficial nematodes need a lot of moisture to move around to find a host insect. A fire ant mound is far too dry to allow those critters to work. Can you elaborate on how you use the BN against ants?

A topical treatment (e.g hot water and or salt) will suppress a mound. But the fire-ant megalopolis extends well beyond the mound. You knock out that mound, and there are still a lot of ants down there left to make more mounds. Rhizo_1 is exactly right. The insecticide bait goes to the queen, wherever that queen is, and knocks out the whole colony. Honestly, the amount of bait you need to use is just minuscule. The ants will take it to where it does the most harm to the colony. From an organic perspective this is far far better than having a pest control company come in and spread poison over your whole yard.

Since the dryer sheet protects the hummer feeder from ants and protects plants from leaf eating ants...

anyone works for the makers of bounce?

We got a 3-day break in our rain, so the fire ant mounds are appearing. Also I took advantage of the break and mowed. That revealed the ant mounds easily. The mound I treated with saltwater and soap last week was dead, so chalk up another one for a saltwater approach. This time I used ammonium sulfate, a common fertilizer, instead of Epsom salts. We're supposed to get hammered by a tropical storm starting any minute now, but if it dissipates this weekend, I'm going to treat all the any mounds I found yesterday with fertilizer water.

I got a cheap version of Over in Out called Knockout from Lowes or Home Depot which lasts 6 months long so I applied it in late spring or early summer. After all the rain, still no ant mounds anywhere. It was rather cheap but apparently very effective so far. I got tired of my kid accidentally sitting on hidden ant mound in tall grass so that's why I started doing this once every summer as preventive measure.

Some of you may have heard we're getting some rain in Texas. Rains really bring out the population boom in fire ants, and they are hungry. Last night I noticed fire ants in my kitchen. They found a piece of chicken skin on the range cooktop. When the ants go for chicken skin instead of sugar, they are very likely to be fire ants. Beyond that I did not give them a direct skin test to see. Instead I sprayed them with this new cleaner I've been trying.

So it make's a clean kill?

I think Super dad suggested I was polluting the ground water with a surface spray for fire ants. I suppose we could have ground water in the top inch, but I haven't seen it. The ingredient of Super Clean is sodium hydroxide. If you remember your chemistry, that's the same as Drano, it's lye. That explains a lot about the effectiveness. Still, I consider that to be an expensive approach.

This winter I heard on the radio about using 1 ounce (2 tablespoons) of Medina Orange Oil per gallon of water and drenching the mound with that. Here's what it looks like. Most all Texas nurseries and/or box stores carry it.

I happened to have an unopened bottle in the garage, so I tried it. There are many recipes for this going up to a cup of orange oil per gallon. But the guy on the radio said 1 ounce per gallon and a dash of dish soap. OMG! We are all familiar with the active appearance of a mound If you stir it up. If you stir it up and pour the orange oil mix on it, all activity stops...in real time...with very few exceptions. I poured half a gallon on and waited. It seemed to not die out completely. I poured the rest of the gallon on, and that finished the mound. It did not pop up 5 feet away. I tried it about 5 times this past spring and am ecstatic to report we have no fire ants currently. These mounds were at least a year old, having returned following the Epsom Salts episode (reported above) from last fall. Unless and until someone comes up with something less poisonous and more effective, I'm sticking with this.

Super Dad, I was on the periphery of some orange oil research by the Air Force back in the mid 1990s when 3M sent us a spray can to try. I sprayed it on the stapler I had inherited from previous inhabitants of my cubby hole. It had masking tape goo on it from generations of users laying claim to the stapler. Anyway, the 3M orange oil spray cleaned the goo right off. The Air Force also used it to clean the carbon and gunk off of jet engine parts. It worked almost as well as the 1,1,1-Trichloroethane they had used up until then, but it was expected the orange oil, being derived from oranges, would be less of an environmental hazard. They experimented with dumping it into the soil, but the orange oil never deactivated. The biggest problem turned out to be that we could not get rid of it in the quantities we needed to. This stuff is not to be trifled with. If anything was going to pollute ground water, it MIGHT be this stuff. The final solution was to minimize the use, filter it, and reuse it. But this fire ant drench is simply pouring it into the soil, albeit in small quantities for the average home owner.

Sodium hydroxide isn't toxic (you eat it on pretzels and bagels) and reacts very quickly in the outside environment with carbon dioxide to form sodium carbonate (a salt) and water. Or one of a few other equally harmless reactants. It's in no way toxic to the environment.

Orange oil is probably worse. And that's not anything I'd worry about, either. :-) It's just a terpene.

Actually, we all know that sodium is horrible for plants, as it osmotically dehydrates them (just like humans)! So no, it is not a good, nontoxic herbicide or pesticide alternative...

The simplest way may be to FIGHT FIRE (ANTS) WITH FIRE (ANTS), literally! Shovel up 1 fire ant mound and dump it right on top of the one you want to get rid of.

The bottom ones will then fight to defend their queen, while the ones on top will try to get down to the ground after getting totally disoriented and displaced. This will cause all the ants from each mound to fight each other 1-on-1 until they're all gone!

That gang war theory sound's a lot like the whiskey and granulated sugar idea.

Actually, we all know that sodium is horrible for plants, as it osmotically dehydrates them (just like humans)!

You got that from a middle school science fair project??? ...where the analysis reported "the plant that was the control was watered with no salt water, yet it still wilted." I have a feeling the young lady has a lot to learn about plants.

First of all, sodium is required for life. We're not talking about bathing a plant in salted water like the middle schooler did. Other ionic salt components, such as magnesium, calcium, and potassium, are also required for life, but I would not bathe a plant in any of those, either.

But since you brought it up, I wonder if salt water would kill fire ants? I had some success with magnesium sulfate.

I really can't believe this conversation of methods is still going on. At it's most simple, a fire ant is just another ant by a different name and can be killed by any number of means be they organic or chemical. The problem does not arise when trying to kill out a single mound, it happens in the fact that the species makes interconnected colonies, each with their own egg laying queen. As such, while you may think you're making headway by dispatching one little old mound of ants, all you've really done is possibly/MAYBE wiped out one ant neighborhood but left the rest of the ant city to flourish. At least to me, this amounts to about the same thing as deciding to squash every ant you see under your thumb with the idea that eventually, you'll get down to that last ant that finally crawls out of the mound to see where all his buddies went.

While I fully respect those who wish to use organic garden methods as much as possible, trying one homemade remedy after another conjured up without some background scientific basis is nothing more than a waste of effort and material and in fact, may cause more long term damage than the occasional use of some known pesticide be that material organic OR chemical. It reminds me of a child with a new chemistry set who can't/won't/never reads the directions and proceeds to blow up the garage.

I made a couple of posts when this subject first arose in 2018 (noted higher up this thread) and still stand by the information I presented then.

" You got that from a middle school science fair project??? "

Don't get me started. :-) You may remember the person who insisted I was wrong about the soap thing just because it was coming out of my keyboard. Because sodium was totally toxic and stuff.

Even the math didn't shut him up,, but did serve to convince the people around him that he was pretty much insane. Then he faked his own death and things went downhill from there.

"Sodium hydroxide isn't toxic (you eat it on pretzels and bagels) and reacts very quickly in the outside environment with carbon dioxide to form sodium carbonate (a salt) and water."

Sodium hydroxide is lye. It IS toxic in significant quantities. VERY toxic. Pretzels and bagels are dipped in a dilute solution of the stuff. When they are baked, the lye reacts to form an innocuous carbonate. That being said, lye will kill most anything in significant quantities. Ants, gophers, horses, people. Of course, you aren't going to eat it when you dump it on fire ant mounds, but why use a large quantity of lye for anything like that? Very tiny amounts of fire ant pesticide wipe out the whole mound. Very effective and not dangerous to the environment.

Sigh. Yes, yes, and salt is toxic in large enough amounts. What you mean is that it's caustic, not that it's toxic, which it isn't particularly.

But "toxic" or "VERY toxic"?

No. Just no. I'd give the "VERY toxic" moniker to things like most pesticides, where 1 part per thousand isn't going to get left on my skin. Raw soap? I'll get around to washing that off when I'm done with the batch...and that's more active than 1 part in 1,000.

" lye will kill most anything in significant quantities."

So will enough water.

" Very tiny amounts of fire ant pesticide wipe out the whole mound. Very effective and not dangerous to the environment. "

Arguable either way, frankly. In normal use, lye's reactants don't poison water tables, nor will you ever use enough to kill tadpoles in any pond, however small. Sodium carbonate simply isn't a particularly strong salt. Honestly, two can play that game.

Lye isn't dangerous to the environment and I go through the stuff by the pound. That is, in this case, a literal statement; as a soap maker, I quite literally buy it by the pound, use it by the pound, and make soap by the multiple pound load. So far, I'm still kicking and I don't wear any protection except eye gear, where a pure lye splash would be a major and instant problem.

Here's the MSDS for lye

•Potential Health Effects

•Eye: Causes eye burns. May cause blindness. May cause chemical conjunctivitis and corneal damage.

•Skin: Causes skin burns. May cause deep, penetrating ulcers of the skin.Ingestion: May cause severe and permanent damage to the digestive tract. Causes gastrointestinal tract burns. May cause perforation of the digestive tract. Causes severe pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and shock.

•Inhalation: Irritation may lead to chemical pneumonitis and pulmonary edema. Causes severe irritation of upper respiratory tract with coughing, burns, breathing difficulty,and possible coma. Causes chemical burns to the respiratory tract.

•Chronic: Prolonged or repeated skin contact may cause dermatitis. Effects may be delayed.

I'll call that "toxic".

That's correct that sodium hydroxide isn't hazardous to the environment. That wasn't my point. My point was that WHY mess around with highly caustic and toxic material that is hazardous to you, when a few grains of Amdro will do the job. Oh, by the way, the MSDS for Amdro says

•Virtually non-toxic by inhalation.

•Virtually non-toxic after a single skin contact.

•Virtually non-toxic after a single ingestion.

But, but, ick! It's a CHEMICAL!!

Hey, if water will kill in significant quantity, why not just drown the fire ant mound! Cheap and easy, right?

'I'll call that "toxic".'

You'd still be wrong.

You also failed to note that Amdro is a class C carcinogen. And by the time it hits class C (possible), that means it's a carcinogen, it's all come down to the lawsuits.

So, yeah.

http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/haloxyfop-methylparathion/hydramethylnon-ext.html

Also, there's that so..."virtually" non-toxic? Cool. Because that's actually more toxic than lye. QED.

Sometimes the creative approach is best. Or at least entertaining. And if it works, it works.

And plants do like to watch TV. Like any other plant, they'll absorb photons from any source from which they can find them. :-)

I place starter trays atop my television (an older tube TV) in my home office in winter. It's several degrees warmer than my office is, so they sprout a bit faster. It forms a secondary heater to the actual sprout heater and trays rotate around the office every eight hours or so.

I'm a little retentive about that sort of thing, actually.