How to Identify & Treat Fire Ants
Fire Ants In North Texas are a common lawn pest that can threaten your family, pets and lawn. Their painful, stinging bites can be especially harmful to people who are allergic to them, and they have been known to hurt or even kill livestock and pets. Often, fire ants build their colonies in electrical equipment, like air conditioners and outlet boxes. The ants chewing on the cables and the soil that the ants move into the equipment can cause severe damage.
Fire ants can harm your turf when they build their colony there. If you’ve found their large mounds in your lawn, you know how maddening the situation can be. Aside from the potential dangers, those mounds are an aesthetic nightmare. Fire ants are efficient when it comes to building these mounds. They have been known to make as many as 300 in a one-acre section.
Identifying Fire Ants in Your North Texas Lawn
Fire ants look similar to many helpful, native ant species. That’s why asking a professional to diagnose the problem is important. Worker fire ants typically have shiny black abdomens with the rest of their body being a dark reddish brown. Most are between 1/16 and ¼ inch long. Knowing which kind of ant is infesting your yard will go a long way toward helping you efficiently solve the problem.
You may think you have eliminated them when you no longer see their mounds, but they may still be underground or moved to a new location. Depending on moisture levels, fire ants will move their mounds upon the surface or below ground.
How to Treat Fire Ants Effectively
Many try to eliminate fire ants from their yard by treating individual mounds. We’ve found that this approach is not as effective as using a broadcast method that treats a larger area. When the problem is particularly severe, we may recommend broadcasting a fire ant bait twice a year and following up with individual mound treatments for those stubborn colonies.
Based on scientific evidence and experience, multiple applications of fire ant bait are often the most effective treatment method. Fire ants mistake the bait for food, bringing it back to their colony, where the queen ingests it. The poison effectively wipes out the colony.
When applied in the spring and fall, this approach is cost-effective and respectful of the environment. Customers often see the effects of the bait application within just a few days. Typically, following up with an individual-mound treatment is unnecessary because the bait proves to be so effective.
