Fire Ants Defy Home Remedies, Authorities Find

More than a year after offering Californians advice on how to combat fire ants with chemicals and boiling water, authorities now warn residents against trying to control the pests themselves.

Home remedies are more likely to worsen the problem, they have since 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, experts now say, only increase the number of ants by causing colonies to break into smaller colonies, which quickly grow into big ones.

When a resident uses store-bought poisons such as Logic or Combat, or pours boiling water into ant mounds, “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.”

Only with the creation of the Fire Ant Authority in February did the official tack on ants change: Residents at last had a place to call for help. The authority was established with $5.9 million from the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which was responding to the statewide 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 compounds to get rid of ants. One sterilizes the queen; the other prevents the ants from processing the nutrients from food, so they ultimately starve to death. The authority does not exterminate inside private homes--it suggests commercial exterminators for that--but treats yards and neighborhoods.

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

Orange County, with about 1,300 identified “sites,” has more fire ants than anywhere else in California, Hearst said. A site can contain several colonies. Los Angeles County has about 200 sites. Other counties have fewer than 80.

Fire ants look like other ants, but their painful sting can be fatal for a small percentage of people allergic to it. Typically, fire ants build mounds that are higher and deeper than normal anthills, and, unlike other ants, have as many as two dozen queen ants per colony. A queen fire ant, often protected four or five feet underground, lays about 1,500 eggs a day.

The authority recently treated a Ladera Ranch family’s yard, and the rest of their block, for fire ants. Hearst said Tony McLaughlin, 32, and his family had suffered the worst fire ant infestation so far in the county. “It was like second place wasn’t even close. That house was full of ants,” Hearst said.

McLaughlin said his bed was crawling with hundreds of ants. McLaughlin’s 2-year-old son was stung so badly--40 times--that the family took him to the emergency room, his feet seemingly swollen to twice their normal size.

“They colonized my house,” McLaughlin said.

New communities such as Ladera Ranch, the largest development in Orange County in a decade, probably will struggle with fire ant infestations and “we’ll end up treating the whole place,” Hearst said. As more homes are built in Orange County, “we are just creating more habitats for the ants,” Hearst said.

Ladera Ranch is beginning the second phase of what will be a community of 8,100 homes. And with the discovery last week of ants in the community, experts worry the rest of the development could see ant trouble ahead. But there is little builders can do. In California, fire ants don’t live at random in the wilderness; they converge when they sense a new source of food--like homes, with their crumbs.

The only option is to treat large areas as soon as residents discover colonies.

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To report fire ants: Call (800) 491-1899 or visit the Fire Ant Authority Web site: https://www.ocfireant.com.