I remember another such post someone asked a good way to get rid of fire ants.People were all writing in and of course the grits came up.An entomologist took the time to write a lengthy post about fireants and all the research they had done and how grits or all the organic tricks absolutely do not work and about 4 posts beyond his someone WHO HAD NOT READ his piece or probably the others wrote "OH I heard you just sprinkle Grits on them." I am sure he wanted to just scream!

Boric acid, not boron. Anyway, I suspect that the ants are more interested in a fat, protein diet than a sugar diet. If you are going to use a home remedy, I suggest that you do not dissolve the boric acid in hot water. Let it do its thing as a dry powder, perhaps sprinkling it on top of peanut butter. Amdro is a very fine fire ant (and other ants) bait, that when used correctly will kill the entire colony in a very short time. I highly recommend it for outdoor use.

Hi Jessaka, I have gardened with fire ants (not, of course, by choice) for as long as I can remember....dating back to at least 1984, which is when we bought our first home. I am pretty sure we had fire ants at my parents home in the very late 1970s or early 1980s. There is a fire ant song in Texas, and you can even buy stuffed, plush fire ants. One place in Texas has tried to turn lemons into lemonade by hosting a Fire Ant Festival. Fire ants are awful when they sting you. It is hard to comprehend a tiny ant can cause such intense pain. Most people have a fairly mild reaction--an instense burning pain immediately after the bite that only lasts a brief while. Most people get a little raised up lump/bump/pustule at the site of the bite, but a childhood friend of our son was allergic and he got a big plum-sized and plum-colored swelling at the bite site and had to go to the doctor for, I think, cortisone shots. If bitten, the quick application of a paste made of baking soda/water reduces the pain and swelling. Because the pain and swelling are short-lived, fire ants sound worse than they are. By the time you realize what's happened, the worst is over. Don't get me wrong--it does hurt. However, the pain passes fairly quickly and you get over it. It isn't like mosquito bites that can bother you for days or like poison ivy that has intense itching. Having said that, the biggest aggravation is if they climb up the insides of your pants leg and you don't know they are there until they get fairly high up and start stinging you around the waistband area, for example, and you realize that you really do have 'ants in your pants' and you have to run inside and strip off all your clothes AND kill the fire ants so they aren't running wild in the house. I also hate it when I feel one bite me and I look down and my shoes and socks are covered in fire ants. I usually take off my shoes and socks on the spot, try to shake off all the ants, etc. It isn't like fire ants attack daily. I can go days or weeks without a fire ant bite. They are just a nuisance. You can treat your landscape with a product that greatly reduces their population. For the longest time we had to use chemical ones, but there have been various organic ones introduced over the last 10-15 years and some of them have worked and others have not. The product that has worked best for us is Once And Done, which I think is by Spectracide. It really works, but we've only used it twice....and there was a three-year break in between. I think any product that has kept fire ants at bay for up to three years in an area like ours where fire ants are common is a good product. We haven't used it in about 3 years now, so it is about time to put out something to keep down the population. My current favorite fire ant products are the ones like Over and Out, Safer Fire Ant Killer and Ecosense Fire Ant Granules that contain Spinosad because they are organic and they work. However, they are a bit slower than Once and Done. On the other hand, I can use them around the fruit trees and veggies, and I don't use the chemical products near areas where I grow edible crops. With all the rain we've had, you'd think the fire ants would be awful this year. They were for a brief period after the April storm dumped a foot of rain in one day. Since then, though, they haven't been that bad. It seems to me that we have less trouble with them, even in untreated areas, every year than we did the year before. So, I think as our soil improves, they move on. Fire ants prefer poor soil that is low in organic matter and biological activity, so they won't stick around much in well-improved soil. I have three spots near/in the veggie garden where fire ants are a persistent problem and I guess I need to work on adding more organic matter, including molasses, to those areas this fall to see if we can correct that. Honestly, Jessaka, compared to the real problems we have with frequent appearances by venomous snakes, bobcats, foxes, coyotoes and the rare cougar....fire ants are just a nuisance and not much of a real threat. They are more of an inconvenience than anything, and they aren't going to drive me out of gardening nor are they going to drive us off of our piece of property. Over the last 20 years, the products used to treat them (both chemical and organic) have become a lot more effective, so I am hopeful that they will be less of a problem in the future than they have been in the past. Dawn

Hi Sammy, I don't have the wooley aphids here so can't help you there, or with the asian lady beetles that follow them. However, I have had to deal with fire ants since the early to mid-1980s, so I am pretty experienced in dealing with them. Fire ants do not pose much of a threat to the average person. Their stings hurt...they do burn like fire for a brief period. You get raised-up pustules at the site of each bite, but they don't especially itch or hurt and they go away after a few days. The people who have bad reactions to fire ants have those reactions because they are allergic to the fire ant bites. A fire ant allergy can express itself in several ways, and I am basing this on various people I know who have had severe reactions. In some people, a fire ant allergy causes huge hives and these hives hurt them much more than the typical little pustule hurts a non-allergic person. Whereas most people get the little pustules, some highly allergic people get big purplish swellings that are about the color of the skin of a purple plum and look like a marble underneath your skin. One of our son's childhood friends had this kind of reaction back in the years when they were in elementary school in the early 1990s. He had lots of other allergies and saw an allergist regularly, but I never could tell that his allergic reactions decreased in frequency or intensity. Other people have intense pain that doesn't fade quickly, itching, abnormal swelling that may include the whole leg or arm which was bitten, dizziness, heart palpitations, and even sometimes they have trouble breathing. In other words, some of them go into anaphylactic shock just like people do when they are severely allergic to bee stings. If getting bitten by fire ants causes this reaction in a person, they should seek medical treatment immediately. I keep liquid Benadryl on hand at all times because it begins working very quickly to counter the effects of an insect sting/bite that is causing a severe reaction. None of us in our family are strongly allergic to fire ants, but remember that allergic reactions tend to develop after repeated exposure so you can't assume just because you've never strongly reacted before that you won't react this time. Also, you can obtain quick relief from fire ant bites by mixing baking soda and water to form a paste and plastering that paste over each bite. That is what the Poison Control Center told me to do when Chris stepped in a fire ant mound when he was 13 months old and was outside at grandma and grandpa's house splashing in puddles after a big thunderstorm. It worked for him then--he had several dozen bites on him as did his grandpa who rescued him from the mound--and we've used it ever since. I also gave him liquid Benadryl at the direction of the Poison Control Center and, between the Benadryl and the baking soda paste, he didn't even get very many of those little pustules in comparison to how many ants we knocked off his little legs and feet. For fire ants in your vegetable and fruit growing areas, you can treat the ground with an organic fire ant killer that has spinosad as the active ingredient. I have used this kind of fire ant killer in my veggie garden for several years and it is pretty effective. In areas where you are not growing edible crops, there are several very effective fire ant products you can use that are chemically based. If you prefer to remain organic, I use one called "Come and Get It" (made by Fertilome) that is very effective, but it is hard to find. You may have to order it online if you don't have a full-line nursery near you that carries a lot of organic products. We also have used a chemical product (NOT near the house, veggie garden or fruit trees, but in areas further away from all of them) called "Over and Out" that was very effective and seemed to have a longer residual effect that any other product we'd tried. Based on my 25 years or so experience with fire ants, I'd say that the Texas Two Step Method is definitely the most effective way to control fire ants, to the extent that they can be controlled at all. You can read about the Texas Two-Step method below and you can do the organic version or the chemical version. Over the long term, improving your soil lessens the amount of fire ants you'll have. However, some years when their populations are heavy, I have just as many in the areas where the soil has been heavily improved as I do in poor soil. Here is a link that might be useful: Texas A&M Fire Ant Website