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Crazy ants have been here for at least 25 or 30 years. They used to carpet the road and houses. They have come back occasionally in "blooms", but not lately. They are pretty harmless, they just crawl over everything. What I call electric ants were the small kind of rectangular black ant that shorted out all of our electrical sockets. They then left after a few years and then the first unnoticed fire ant came in. There was a draught last year. We tested with peanut butter on chopsticks for fire ants. Nothing though I thought I had been stung by something a few times, never saw what. Then months of rain where we did not do much outside. When it stopped, we noticed a lack of other ants, our chickens were hungrier being that the fire ants had driven every insect out, then our garden died all of a sudden. We were stupid. Fire ants farm scale, mealy bugs and aphids. Even a small soursop almost died from mealy bug. They were dense. Now spreading Talstar so that our dogs don't go blind from fire ant bites. Any better ideas?
Posts: 278
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Now spreading Talstar so that our dogs don't go blind from fire ant bites. Any better ideas?
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Re: LFA control.
I have 4 acres. Never heard of Talstar. I have been using the Spectracide product from Home Depot and a spreader and doing the whole property but they come back. Does anyone have a recommendation for acreage as to what granular product I could use and where to buy it online or local store for hopefully a somewhat reasonable price. If I have to do the whole property every couple of months so be it. Forget help from the neighbors, I can only rely on my own efforts.
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Joined: Oct 2008
When my daughter was attending Keaau HS in 1999 she and others in her class provided peanut butter stick samples from their homes. Her sample was found to have these tiny fire ants (we live in middle of HPP)and was included in the UH Hilo Ag study. Though we had the ants on our property they did not become problematic until about a year ago, now they are everywhere including the house which is on a slab. Our biggest task is to keep them from farming the aphids on our fruit trees. The only benefit to this outbreak is our Giant African Snail Population has dropped at least 95%.
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Is that what happened to the big snails? Ours are gone, too. Too bad the little buggers don't kill slugs.
Posts: 50
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Joined: Oct 2008
Same here Chunkster still have the slugs. Our snail population was unreal being surrounded by unimproved lots on all sides.
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Joined: Jul 2007
How about importing a bunch of anteaters?
