On Monday, December 20, 2010 2:41:07 PM UTC-6, NorMinn wrote:
I'm thinking that any pest control contractor in either Florida or Texas
who can't get rid of fire ants on the first go 'round might not know
what the heck they are doing. Fire ants are so common both places that
is really well known. Another spot that I forgot to mention is fire
ants nesting in electrical boxes...saw it mentioned again in one of the
articles I posted. Reason not known, but it is fairly commonplace.
Another treatment/bait mentioned is peanut butter mixed with boric
acid...works nicely for roaches, too. We got $500 worth when we had our
Florida condo treated for roaches )

Fire ants are definitely very common, that is true, but from what I've seen and read the type of outbreak we have is rather atypical. Even the folks at our local county ag extension office haven't heard of such an indoor infestation of fire ants like we have before. Our bug guy treated the ants as if they were coming from the walls by baiting outside and spot spraying inside, and we've not seen one single ant in the yard since... so yes that is working. But in our situation they're under the house which takes more work. Until we found the massive line of ants from the sand trap there never were trails to bait per say. I would see a few here or a few there, but the few trails I saw were always at night or early in the morning when the bug guy wasn't around.

But Termidor in the sand traps has worked with the infestation, but given there's still paths for ants to come in through the pipes in the foundation (and their enzyme trails are now all over the place) we still have worker ants coming in all too often. So hopefully with more aggressive chemicals used in the walls where the pipes are that'll kill the few worker ants that do try to make it in and hopefully detour them all together eventually. I don't know how long it takes an ant colony to die out without water or food, but given they have zero ways to get inside hopefully they'll move elsewhere if the bait outside doesn't do the trick sooner.