Controlling Fire Ants at your Home

What Does Fire Ant Look Like?

Color: Reddish

Size: About 1.5 to 5 mm

Fire ants can be recognized by dull red body pigmentation, which ranges from reddish-brown to reddish black. Fire ants get protection from a hard exoskeleton and six legs. Their head is copper brown in color. Fire ants have an abdominal stinger. Their name comes from the bite and the sting that they deliver.

How Do They Get In?

Fire ants build visible soil mounds usually in sunny areas. Their mounds are domed-shaped and can be as long as 18 cm tall and 61 cm wide. They like to appear in open fields and lawns; they avoid encountering dark and shady areas such as wood. Fire ants feed mainly on living insects and dead animals. Whereas when they dominate your house, then they rely on fat and sweet foods. Fire ants colonies with one queen ant contain hundreds of thousands of male ants.

Red imported fire ants may come to yards due to contaminated nursery plants or grass sod being used while landscaping the house. Prevention and control of fire ants are quite difficult because the colonies large enough to extend various places. 

How Serious Are Fire Ants?

Fire ant stings are painful for most people and critical to some: immediate emergency medical attention is needed for those who feel reactions like nausea, sweating, or extreme itching. People may experience anaphylactic shock if they have some sort of allergies, Fire ants use their mandibles to attack the prey and inject venom via a stinger which results in scarring. The sensation from their bite is call as stinging and intense burning and fire ants are known to attack prey in large numbers. Their colony may contain nearly 100,000 to 500,000 fire ants, therefore mounting the chances that multiple stings will be imposed. 

Be extra cautious while entering your garden. Avoid placing food where you found fire ants mound. Since treating fire ants could be dangerous, Green Garden Landscaping recommends the homeowners choose professional help instead of attempting to treat colony mound infestations on their own. Opting for professional fire ant pest control services will abolish the risk and guard your family and yard.

Where Did They Actually Come From?

The red imported fire ant was accidentally brought into the United States in the 1930s via a shipment of cargo and till then they have become a nuisance for people of America, especially in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and parts of North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California.

However, their original place of invasion was Alabama, in the USA, and eventually, they spread all over the southern states with the warm and dry climate and mostly due to lack of natural predators. Unlike native fire ants that do not cause many serious issues to your lawn, red imported ants can destroy has the potential to devastate your lawn’s ecosystem. 

How Fire Ants Pave their Way to Destroy your Lush Green Lawn?

Fire ants start making mounds in your lawn with the army of nearly 500,000 fire ants. When you first see the mound in your lawn, you will only see the tip of the iceberg of the damage fire ants can cause to your yard. They start multiplying their numbers and establish themselves on your lawn. You start noticing mounds after several months of work. 

What is the Behavior, Diet & Habit of Fire Ants?

Nest

They build their nest in the ground. Normally, nests may look like mounds of 61 cm in diameter and nearly 18 cm long in height.

Diet

Fire ants are omnivorous and eat meat such as insects, ticks, spiders, earthworms, and arthropod eggs. If in house, they eat fatty and sweet food. Normally, fire ant eats dead animals. Fire ant larvae are fed by the worker adults. They eat only liquid food until their third larval instar is complete. Fourth instar larvae start digesting solid foods.

Behavior

Fire ants react instantly to any distractions made by people or animals. Their reaction to disturbance also extends below ground. They relocate fast to a different location if facing constant disturbance.

Reproduction of Fire Ants

It took on an average of 30 days from egg to adult; workers may live nearly 180 days; queens live 2 to 6 years.

 How to Get Rid of Fire Ants?

Preventing fire ants from your lawn and home is quite a cumbersome task because of following mentioned reasons: 

- Fire ants colonies are often very large and extended under the ground to a greater extend.

- Each colony has multiple queens which help in rebuilding the workers count. 

- Hazardous for pets and people

Thus, it is always advisable to consult a professional. In North Carolina, Green Garden Landscaping helped several families and businesses by providing effective treatment for fire ants. Call us and we schedule our expert for a thorough inspection of the infected area for a deep-rooted and permanent solution forever.