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 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
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!
Ant Bite Photo Credit to © Can Stock Photo Inc. / AuntPittypat
© Can Stock Photo Inc. / sweetcrisis
what a great idea. if there are lots is mounds, it would even be good exercise!
uh. no. that’s crazy.
corn meal works and hosing down the mound.
A mound can be up to 30 feet Deep in the ground and spread 20′-50′ in any direction, contain 100,000-500,000 ants per colony. Hosing the mound will do little except cause them to Spread out and infest the property further.
That did NOT work, and 36 bites put me into anaphylactic shock that I nearly died from. My tongue and lips were hideously swollen, throat swelled shut; required 3 days in hospital on respiratory therapy. Corn meal did not do a thing! Hosing? Seriously? Dangerous practice that only angers and spreads them!
no fire ants here in maine but i do have lots of regular ant holes. without exaggerating too much i would say there are probably 300 ant holes in my lawn. This makes the grass spotty in some places.
Not too mention it is irritating to have them crawl up your legs while hanging laundry, using the picnic table or just sitting outside.
Would this same shoveling stunt work with regular ants? I like the idea but do not want to do it if it will not work. Thanks for such a great website.
It has the potential to work with any ant colony, but it works particularly well with fire ants because they are such vehement little critters.
I also live in Maine, and our property has been taken over by red ants, black ants, every size and color of ants. I just recently tried corn meal, and I think it might be working. I’m going to get some diatomaceous (sp?) earth today to try that as well, though.
wow, this is great advise! thank-you so much.
i am gonna try it. will probably scare me to death, but gonna try it.
good thing to know. thanks! hope i don’t have to use it.
good idea, but i am allergic to their bite. i wonder if i can talk someone else into doing this for me.
found this recipe for fire ants
pour 2 cups club soda directly in center of fire ant mound.the carbon dioxide in soda is heavier than air and displaces oxygen which suffocates queen and other ants. the whole colony should be dead in 2-3 days. each mound must be done separately.
1 liter will kill 2-3 mounds.
hope this helps.
i do want to try this on ant mounds here in tx. i am thinking i may have to do this several days in a row. ant hills and ant underground systems are bigger in tx.
lol
baby powder & corn starch fine for the shovel, but what about your feet and legs ? what if you are allergic to the little buggers?:voodoo: will try when i go to fl.
neither corn meal nor grits work. i was out of state visiting a cousin once, and didn’t know about a hidden nest under leaves in a driveway, and stepped in it. fire ants put me into anaphylactic shock and i spent 2 days in the hospital from only 37 bites.
The nest had been treated with grits, so you see how effective that was!
(For those who don’t know – grits is a form of corn meal) fire ant nests can be so large and so deadly to people like me that the only sure way to get rid of them is to use a powerful chemical insecticide or call a pest control company. these things can kill; don’t mess with them. they are very aggressive and will bite you before you know they’re anywhere near you.
they can kill someone who is allergic to bees, ants, and wasps, and it only takes one bite to sensitize someone so that a second bite might be fatal.
i can tell you that hugely swollen lips, a swollen tongue that is too big to keep in your mouth, and your throat swelling shut so you can’t breathe is terribly frightening!
if you have children around, don’t even think about home remedies – their lives aren’t worth it.
Amdro… pour amdro on the mound and/or around your yard. Ants will be gone within a day and stay gone!
I live in Texas and I had an acre of land with fire ants and black ants.
Some mounds had been there for years! I was told about Amdro from a co-worker. It works!
I even used it on mounds in my neighbors yards that were near my fence line.
I has ZERO ants in my yard 🙂
There are thousands of species of ants that pose different threats to humans. Some are just looking for the food. Some are looking to bite you, nasty little things.
Ant bite can have different effect on different people.
Some people might feel a little itching for a moment, on some it might last longer. Ant bite can also result in vomiting.
Pour molten lead or aluminum into the mound until it overflows the top. Let it cool, then pull out the solidified “tree”, re-melt & re-use.
Diatomaceous earth works better. Use food grade. Sprinkle on and around the mounds. It’s completely safe and works on many types of insects.
Definitely going to try this! Don’t like using poison around pets!
Ortho Fire Ant Killer works. It kills a lot. What’s left move to a different place. Sooner or later what’s left moves to the neighbors yard. 🙂 It is a white powder and is a little smelly. I get great joy in coming back to see all the dead ants on the mound.
I used to play the 2nd shovel using this method growing up in south GA…works like a charm!
if that works, then why do they build so many mounds close to each other? Same nest perhaps.. then shoveling them up and put them on the next mound does not seem like it would work. or they would have already killed each other off.
Because they don’t build mounds directly beside each other. If you see small hills nearby others, it’s the same colony.
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.
If you have a shallow mound, Pouring 2 to 3 gallons of very hot or boiling water on the mound will kill ants about 60% of the time. As explained above, ants live very deep in the earth and often the water can’t reach. Boiling or very hot water will kill any grass or surrounding vegetation that it is poured on.
The best natural ant killer for any type of ant is a mixture of dawn dish soap and water: Make a mixture of dish soap or dishwashing liquid, put in a spray bottle and shake it well. Spray it on the ants. The solution will stick to the ants and the dish soap suffocates the ants to death.
Unfortunately, this will not eradicate a colony, this will only kill visible ants that you can directly spray.
Methods to kill fire ants naturally:
1. Ignite a fire and wait for the area to become engulfed in flames.
2. Pour boiling water over the ant nest and cover the area with a tin lid so it’s airtight.
3. Sprinkle ground cinnamon around the infested areas and leave it overnight.
Just kidding, none of those really work. Fire ants are a pain in the ass.
They can hurt you, they can kill your cat, and when they’re in flood water, it’s hard to keep them away from your doors and windows.
There is no truly 100% organic (i.e., nontoxic) solution to deal with fire ant colonies that I am aware of that will guarantee the death of every single one of the insects. But there are some pretty decent options available to you for dealing with this pest:
1.) Grub control
Step 1: Go out and buy grub treatment (the active ingredient should be either imidacloprid or chlorantraniliprole). Step 2: Apply according to manufacturer’s instructions. That’s really all there is to it. If you opt for this method, let me add that Consumer Reports recommends Bayer Advanced Grub Control; they say it works very well on fire ants, and I can vouch personally that I’ve seen it work on my property:
2.) A mixture of cornmeal and boric acid
Step 1: Mix together one part (by volume) each of cornmeal and boric acid powder. Make sure the mixture is free-flowing; if it’s not, add more of either ingredient until it is. Step 2: Add about a half teaspoon of this mix to a small bowl or jar lid. Soak the mix with just enough water so that the resulting slurry has the consistency of pancake batter or peanut butter. Step 3: Place the bowl or lid wherever you have seen ants recently.
3.) A mild borax solution
Step 1: Mix together one part (by volume) each of Borax and sugar. Make sure the mixture is free-flowing; if it’s not, add more of either ingredient until it is. Step 2: Dip a sponge mop into this solution and apply liberally to any fire ant mound you can find in your yard. Try to use as little of the solution as possible to avoid harming non-target organisms like earthworms, honeybees, etc.; but make sure there are no human targets nearby when you do this! If you’re caught out in open during treatment, seek shelter