good morning,
just a note for assistance....the property i bought has fire ants and while we were "bush hogging" yesterday, we found more than i expected [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img] ..... any suggestion to control this issuse??? (maybe i missed a thread here)......
thank you and good luck,
bluebonnet2
We are considering Guineas to eat 'em up.
I've found the "baits" like Amdro work the best. It's expensive, but it seems to work well. You just sprinkle a couple of table spoons around each mound. You'll see the worker ants carrying it into the mound to feed "momma". After you've treated the mounds you can keep them at bay by lightly broadcasting the same stuff each year.
How much property are you trying to treat? If it'a a bunch, I'd call the county ag extension for some cheaper control recommendations.
I was planting flowers for the wife over the weekend and got into a bunch of 'em. Man, do they itch!
BTW: I believe the fireants keep the tick population under control. When I had rid the lawn of virtually every last fireant, I had a tick population explosion. I'd rather deal with the ticks then the fireants. though.
I tried a number of things for fireant control and for me, the Texas two-step method, using Logic and Diazinon, worked best. Go to Google.com and enter "Texas A&M fireant control" and you'll find the two-step method in pdf format. I broadcast the Logic annually, then treated individual mounds as I found them with a gallon of diluted diazinon. Of course I was buying the chemicals from a farm chemical distributor which made them much cheaper and easier to find.
Some good news is that there are itsy bitsy tiny parasitic flies that lay there eggs on fire ants and the larva hatch out and crawl around in the ant's head eating the contents. This natural control is begining to catch up with the spread of fireants into new territory. Of course it will not elliminate the ants but it will (and has in some areas) reduced the population.
Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
Yeah, Pat, I read awhile back about the hopes that those flies would control the fire ant population, but haven't seen anything lately, so I don't know where and how many of the flies have been released or how effective they are. I guess we can hope that they are effective and don't turn out later to be even worse than the fire ants, like some of our "cures" for pests have been in the past.
<font color="blue">"I guess we can hope that they are effective and don't turn out later to be even worse than the fire ants, like some of our "cures" for pests have been in the past." </font color>
Just like that wonderful plant "Kudzu" that was imported to help prevent soil erosion.
The University of Florida did a lot of the development work on the "Fire Ant Fly" and have released these little guys loose around here or so I'm told. They were released quite some time ago but if they have done any good we had a much larger problem than I thought. They claim that while the fly is very small it can be seen with the naked eye if you will get close to the ant! I'll take their word for that. I hope this works and we can rid our land of the Fire Ant. They are very bad....
Leo
Biological control of such pests should be a hot research topic, but I haven't followed that area for some time. A few years ago, I was interested in some common fungi that attack various insects, including many that are pests. My faorite was Metarrhizium anisopliae , which digests a hole in the victim's exoskeleton and then proceeds to grow throughout the entire body. I had some neat pictures showing mushroom-like growths out of the carcass...wish I could find them. Anyway, these parasitic fungi are all over the place anyway, so the usual assumption is that they might be fairly safe control agents. If I had fire ants on my property, I'd be tempted to see if my fungal cultures are still alive so I could grow up a flask, dump it on the mound, and see what happened.
Chuck
Sounds like the first paragraph of the lead in to a SCIFI thriller!
Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
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