In Georgia fire ants spend very little time in hibernation. When cold weather comes, they will slow down, or even seal off the entrance to their colony, but it doesn’t last long. When temperatures warm the ground up, these ants get busy doing what they were made to do.
What are fire ants made to do?
No, the answer isn’t: bite you. Though they are prone to bite, and fire ant bites can be annoying, they have no interest in feeding on your flesh. This is an aggressive insect, and it will bite if whatever it is on begins to vibrate. When one ant bites, it triggers the rest of the fire ants to bite–and sting. Fire ants only bite to get a grip. That painful mark on your skin is left from the stinger in their abdomen which they use to inject a toxic alkaloid venom called Solenopsin. But fire ants aren’t looking to bite you. You are far too large for them to carry back to their colony. if you were something smaller, they might give it a go, because gathering food and liquid is all these ants think about 24/7.
Why do they gather food? Why don’t they just eat it when they find it?
Fire ants can’t consume solid food. They have something like a screen inside their throats that won’t let even the smallest particle pass. This is one of the reasons they bring food back to the mound. The food they bring back is turned into a liquid state by larvae inside the colony (you don’t want to know how) and workers then feed on it and share it with the other ants in the colony, including the queen.
Can you get workers to bring poisoned food back to kill their queen?
You probably know that if a queen dies, the colony dies. But it can be tricky to try and get workers to bring bait into a mound and kill the queen, because of the process mentioned above. If larvae and workers begin to die too quickly, the queen will be carried deeper into the earth, sometimes yards away from where she was, and the ants will wait till the danger has passed before they attempt to keep feeding her. This means bait must be properly mixed to kill the ants slowly.
Send an ant to kill an ant.
If you’re trying to kill fire ants, you need to think like an ant. That is why do-it-yourself measures seldom work. You’re not trained to think like an ant. But an entomologist is. They are scientists who study the behaviors and habitats of insects. If you want those fire ants gone, call a pest company like Active Pest Control which employs a board certified entomologist. They may not be an ant, but knowing how ants think helps them destroy those colonies around your home, and keep them from coming back.
