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How to Kill Fire Ants Naturally

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Fire ants are the scourge of Spring, Summer, and Fall, causing many families extreme duress at the idea of sending a child out to play in the yard. A fire ant mound can pop up within hours . . . turning a once beautiful yard into a dangerous place for kids, pets and the elderly. We’ll show you how to kill fire ants naturally using this 100% organic pest control method.

How to Kill Fire Ants Naturally

If you’ve ever had a run-in with these pests you know that it literally takes them only a minute to congregate and mass attack their victim, which can be as large as full-grown cattle. 

While fire ants are a nightmare in your yard, they actually can be indicative of a bigger problem. Fire ants nest where there is a decent supply of food nearby. They LOVE to eat insects, fleas, ticks, and termites. If you have a number of fire ant mounds near your house, you may want to have it checked for termites to ensure that’s not the reason they settled nearby.

Here is an amazingly simple, cheap and highly effective method for killing fire ants without chemicals.

how-to-kill-fire-ants-naturally

How to Identify Fire Ants

Fire ants are deceivingly small, tiny even by ant standards, but that won’t prevent them from coming up in tiny crevices in your home, through power outlets, along water pipes or electrical wires. In fact, it makes it quite easy for them to invade your home in a very short period of time (less than 24 hours to build a large nest).

When they attack, they do so systematically, working together to poison their victim with painful bites that create nasty, itchy painful pustules. As you can see from the photograph of the arm of a teen who fell nearby a fire ant mound, it only takes a few seconds for them to swarm their victim. On average about 40 human fatalities result from insect stings, many of them from fire ants.

How to Get Rid of Fire Ants

How to Kill fire ants Naturally

You’ll Need:
Baby Powder or Cornstarch
A Gardening Shovel (or 2)
and an Assistant (or not)

Here’s a very simple remedy for Nature’s most vicious beasts:

This works best if you have a helper. You’ll both need a spade shovel (the pointy kind that digs in easily). Sprinkle a bit of cornstarch or baby powder on the handle of the shovel first to prevent the ants from crawling up the shovel handle towards your hands.

Locate a large Fire ant mound on your property. This shouldn’t be very difficult to do, they have a tendency to pop up all over the place as soon as the weather gets warm.

Now, Locate the second mound of similar size.

At the same time, each of you should shovel deeply into the mound, scooping up as many angry fire ants as possible from your chosen mound.

Now, walk to the other person’s mound and dump the shovelful of angry fire ants onto the neighboring mound at the same time.

The ants will Immediately begin fighting each other and kill each other off. It will take approximately 3 days for them to seek out each other’s Queen and dispose of her, wiping each other out.

Rather than pouring chemicals, which will kill only a few and force the others to move to another choice spot on your property, the ants’ natural instincts will kick in causing them to protect their own nest at any cost.

If you don’t have the extra help you can do it yourself, but it works easier with two people because the ants begin fighting instantly.

This is a completely all natural, chemical free, nature-friendly method of removing fire ants from your property.

How Big is the Mound?

There are some DIY sites that recommend pouring hot water into a nest to “get rid of the ants”.

Unfortunately, that will do very little. A fire ant mound can be up to 30 feet deep in the ground and spread 20′-50′ in any direction and contain 100,000-500,000 ants per colony.

So for those that think hosing down a mound, or pouring boiling water into a mound will be effective, keep this in mind!

how-to-kill-fire-ants-naturally

Ant Bite Photo Credit to © Can Stock Photo Inc. / AuntPittypat
© Can Stock Photo Inc. / sweetcrisis

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