Invasion of the Ants

We finally cooled off some and had a bit of rain. Only about a quarter of an inch but it was enough for the 'Invasion of the Ants'.

The rain caused the ants to swarm. Have you ever seen an ant bed swarm? That is when all the ants that want to be queens grow wings and come swarming out of the hole to find and set up their own ant beds, or holes. This is most common after a rain. I had seen it happen with some of the smaller ants that we have all over here but this was the first time I saw one of the big, black, biting ants do it. They are about a quarter of an inch long or maybe a little more. We have red ones and black ones and they hurt worse than a bee sting when they bite. They are really bad about climbing up the inside of someone's pants leg when working in the garden and taking a bit out of the tinder part of your leg when they start getting squized between you and your pants. Anyway this bed decided to swarm right outside of my hayshed under my nicest shade tree. I walked out to feed the horses and saw the ground was black and moving. And flying. There was a sort of circle of ants about 12 to 14 feet around and across. It was kind of horrifying like a horror movie and I didn't think to take a photo. We could only think how to kill them before they got into the hay and over on the horses. I used the water hose and hubby used his big push broom to sweep them into a wet pile and not having any kind of ant spray Lee poured some left over chainsaw gas on the pile of wiggling ants. Of course this took about a hour of hard work. there were still plenty of the little devils flying around while we were working and even afterward. Hubby shoveled the pile of wet, gas soaked ants and dirt into a trash sack to wait for trash day. It was all we could think to do. They were coming out of a crack in the ground near the shade tree where I didn't even know there was an ant bed. I try to keep a handle on those kind of ants using a product called Amdro that is a poison you sprinkle on the bed. I don't like using any kind of chemical but on the big ants, sometimes called fire ants because of how bad the stings are I do use the Amdro. Anyway we did kill most of the ants and haven't found any trying to make homes in the hay but did see a few starting beds in our dirt driveway and I gave them a dose of Amdro.

A week before I had dosed about 10 beds just on the border of our property as the ants had started invading the horses feed areas to steal hay for food and to line their nests with.

I am hoping it doesn't happen again. I saw a couple of the little ants swarming some but it was so minor in comparison that I just ignored them.