Anybody have a homemade recipe for getting rid of fire ants ?
Yeah, stab each of them through the heart with a very sharp straight pin
Well, years ago there was Orthene, don't think it is on the market anymore. The stuff stunk so bad that it had to be kept outside, the smell would go through any container. Used to put a teaspoonful on every mound, while holding breath.
Every "home" remedy I have heard of is a waste of time, or totally impractical if you have any land at all. Here in TX, if you were to treat mounds one by one that you saw, you would miss the up and coming mounds, or other stealth mounds. But the big mound-building here is usually only after enough rain to get the soil really wet, that they build the mound up to have a place to transfer the eggs to get up out of the soggy ground. Most of the year, we don't really see many built-up mounds. So a mound-by-mound approach doesn't work well.
I have had real good luck with Amdro. Have to keep it in the house, needs to be cool, as it is a bait. Apply it in the evening when the sun is off the area. Can spot-treat mounds, but better yet, can spread it very thinly (like 1 lb per acre) via a hand-cranked hand-held seed spreader on the lowest setting. I do it in strips that do not overlap. That is, a 15 foot wide or so strip, then a 15 foot strip of no spread, then another 15 foot wide strip of spread. The fire ants forage over a bigger distance than 15 feet, so they will find it. Amdro takes a while, it is not an immediate-death kind of poison. But it kills the multiple queens.
