How "YOU" Control FIre Ants with Your Free Range Chickens Roaming.

[chickengeorgeto]

The subterranean portion of a fire ant mound can cover an acre. There may well, and in large colones there likely are multiple queens. What ever you try by all means DO NOT disturb the mound. Disturbing the hill or mound will only result in the ants creating a new mound in a different location, which may trick you into believing that you have succeed in destroying the colony. The best pesticide for fire ants is the same one that works so well against chicken mites, Pyrithian. Do not spray the mound or disturb it in any fashion, instead use a bait like Amdrol. Adult fire ants are unable to eat solid food. All fire ant food is first fed to the fire ant young and the ant larva eat and digest this food then regenerate part of it in liquid form. the adult ants consume this liquid food. The ant larva die first and that leaves the worker ants without a food source so they starve.

 

[TinyBirds]

We use plain boiling water on mounds. It takes several gallons.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

We use plain boiling water on mounds. It takes several gallons.

If a large ant hill covers an acre and contains multiple queens you will likely need 10s of thousands of gallons of boiling water to make a dent in the fire ant population.

Besides, the nest will usually go all the way to ground water. All boiling water will do is to encourage the ants to construct a new mound or ant hill. Perhaps the new mound will be located in an ever worse location than the one that you tried to baptize with hot water.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

There is a treatment for fire ants used in Texas that is very satisfactory. First you drink a 6 pack or 2 of cold Long Star beer. Then you recycle the Long Star beer onto the ant mound. This fire ant treatment is no better than the hot water cure but it does have the benefit of being more emotionally rewarding than pouring hot water on the mound.

 

[Lazy Farmer]

(pesticide), (Pyrithian), (Amdrol.).

We are looking for a safe for the Goat population cure as well. But will look into to it. Thanks

 

[TinyBirds]

Mainly we use the boiling water to get them away from our foundation to stop coming in the house. It has worked for that purpose for 15+ years for us. It does take a lot of effort though and sometimes weeks of dumping boiling water every summer. We also put a line of dawn dishsoap along entry doors outside and they dont cross it since it is wet and sticky if applied every few days. Back when we did use pesticides though, diazinon (nasty stuff thats now illegal), we had fireants in the house anyway. Based on the number of neighborhoods doing pesticides year to year, i dont think there is any long term decline in their population by using pesticides either. When i worked for del webb, a big developer, they used steam injection because of endangered insect species in the area. That worked well if you can find a company that does it.