Fire ants bite your skin with their mandibles, hang on tight, and then jam the stingers on their abdomens into your flesh. The site of the sting hurtsfor several minutes. It then swells into a bump that eventually turns into a pustule that can last for days, sometimes becoming infected and requiring further treatment. The venom can lead to severe allergic reactions in some people, occasionally resulting in death.
With summer-like temperatures already baking the ground, this is the time of year fire ants become active again, wreaking havoc not just in yards, but also in gardens, pastures and farmlands. In addition to stinging humans, they prey on beneficial insects, worms, bird eggs and even small mammals.
Fire ants are voracious predators, they will also tend aphids, herding them like cows. They’ll prey on newly hatched chicks. They’ll out-compete birds for their food sources, forcing the birds to forage farther for food, which exposes them to other predators. These kinds of impacts are hard to quantify, but they are probably a larger issue, ecologically, than just the human health issue.
Fire ants live in colonies in the soil, and the mound you see above ground represents just a portion of the entire nest. The intricate web of tunnels below ground is extensive, including foraging tunnels that can extend dozens of yards from the main colony. The foragers use these tunnels — as opposed to holes in the mound itself — to enter and exit the nest.
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Fire ants form new colonies when winged males and females soar hundreds of feet into the air and mate while in flight. The males die soon after, but the females land and then go in search of a place to start a new home. There will always be new queens looking for fresh starts, and they can re-infest from long distances. This makes it virtually impossible to eradicate fire ants permanently from your yard. Fire ants cannot eat solid food, so they carry it back to the nest and feed it to the oldest larvae, which are able to externally digest solids and turn them into nutritious liquids. The worker ants then share this now-edible by product with the queen and the rest of the colony. https://vimeo.com/125974638 Go Green Pest Control Ladner Pest Control Tsawwassen Pest Control Delta Pest Control Randy Bilesky