I wouldn't wish fire ants on my worst enemy. You want to watch where you step very carefully. Actually, they might just make it up north. Years ago, when they first started invading the United States (IIRC, they came in on South American cargo ship at a port in Alabama), they didn't think they'd make it up too far north because the winters would be too cold. But they did.

And various states and localities started fire ant "eradication" programs. That was soon changed to "control". Now it's just "management". Gosh time is flying, they've been firmly established here for at least 15 years.

They are very aggresive -- just poke a mound and millions swarm out in full attack mode. And what they do is swarm all over a victim before they bite. They'll be all over you before you know it, and then the leaders send out a little chemical signal to attack and they all sting at once. Each sting raises up a little pustule that burns like, well, fire.

Me, I've never been swarmed, but I've come close, and have been stung by a few of them at once. It ain't pleasant. A small percentage of the population is allergic (I think its possible to become progessively sensitized ot it, but I'm not sure) to the venom and they have killed people. I think I remember a local women dying after she got swarmed just a year or two ago.

Last year, I tried a new anti-fire ant product, a growth regulator hormone in a typical "grits" bait that worked pretty good. I just applied some last month around the yard. And yep, I'll be putting some around the well house as well.

The buggers are so clever that getting a poison in the colony to kill the queen is very difficult. She has a long chain of food tasters. Their sense of "smell" is to a dog as a dog is to us and they can detect certain chemicals in low concentrations. The workers bring food in and it goes through a chain of feeding to various larval stages inside the colony and the workers themselves before it finally gets to the queen. If anything happens to them, they know who ate what and throw out everybody who touched the suspected food source.

So to get a poison in, it's got to be undetectable to the ant and slow enough to get to the queen before they notice anything is wrong. And then even then, they multiply so prolifically it's a losing battle.

The growth regulator approach messes up the life cycle, preventing the larva from maturing at the right time, and it seems to do fairly well. Other research is looking at bringing in some of the fire ant's natural South American enemies (but taking care not to create a monster with that). Let's see, Clemson has being doing some research on some fly that lays eggs in the workers......

-Richard