Leave Fire Ant Battle to the Professionals, Experts Say

More than a year after offering advice on how to combat fire ants with chemicals and boiling water, authorities are now warning residents not to try to control the pests themselves.

Home remedies are more likely to worsen the problem than resolve it, they have discovered.

In early 1999, just a few months after fire ants were discovered in Orange County, state pest control experts and county officials said residents should use over-the-counter pesticides to kill the stinging ants, or pour boiling water on ant mounds. But those methods, ant experts say now, only increase the number of fire ants by causing their colonies to break into smaller colonies, which quickly grow into big colonies again.

When an ant mound is attacked with store-bought poisons, or with boiling water, “one colony can fragment into 12, and those colonies will rebuild into what they once were very quickly,” said Mike Hearst, spokesman for the Orange County Fire Ant Authority. “Part of rebuilding yourself is breeding. We just accelerate the process.”

Last February, with the creation of the Fire Ant Authority, residents at last had a place to call for help and to find out about the new strategy for combating the pest. The authority was established with $5.9 million from the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which was responding to the statewide ant problem.

The authority will exterminate ants outdoors, at no charge, by using chemicals unavailable over the counter. Hearst said the Fire Ant Authority uses two separate compounds to get rid of ants. One sterilizes the breeding queens of a colony; the other prevents the ants from processing the nutrients from food, so they ultimately starve to death. The authority does not exterminate ants in private homes--it suggests commercial exterminators for that--but treats yards and other outdoor areas.

“We’re learning about these ants day by day,” Hearst said.

According to Hearst, Orange County, with about 1,300 identified ant infestation sites, has more fire ants than any other area in California. A site can contain several colonies. Los Angeles County has about 200 sites.

Fire ants look like other ants, but their stings are painful, and can be fatal to the small number of people who are allergic to them. Typically, fire ants build mounds that are higher and deeper than normal anthills, and, unlike other types of ants, have as many as two dozen queens per colony.

Last week, the Fire Ant Authority treated a Ladera Ranch family’s yard, and the rest of their block, for the fire ants. Hearst said Tony McLaughlin, 32, and his family had suffered the worst fire ant infestation so far in Orange County. “That house was full of ants,” Hearst said.

McLaughlin said even his bed was crawling with hundreds of ants. McLaughlin’s 2-year-old was stung so badly--40 times--that the family took him to the emergency room. “They colonized my house,” McLaughlin said.

New communities such as Ladera Ranch probably will struggle with fire ant infestations and “we’ll end up treating the whole place,” Hearst said. As new housing tracts open, “we are just creating more habitats for the ants,” he said.