 I am Chip East with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System and I'll be discussing how to manage fire ants with baits. There can be many mature colonies per acre with hundreds of thousands of ants per mound. A lot of time and money is spent on managing these ants and understanding more about the biology of the fire ants may help you understand why some treatments may or may not have worked in the past. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as permanent fire ant control. Fire ants can move from place to place in several different ways. Alates are weaned adult ants. A mature colony will produce between four and six thousand alates each year, about half or male and half female. These weaned adults will fly, mate and search for new areas to start a colony. The weaned adults are attracted to shiny objects and may land in swimming pools, ponds, roofs of buildings and back of pickup trucks and many of them die. Even if they make it to a suitable site, other fire ants in the area can kill them. Those that make it will bury in the ground, start laying eggs and tending to the young colony. It takes time before the colony is large enough to construct a visible mound. Since you can have several young colonies in the area that may not have built a visible mound, individual mound treatments is not my first plan of attack against fire ants. Adult fire ants cannot digest solid food. They must feed the oldest larva in the colony. The larvae will digest the food and spit it back up and the adult ants feed from there. You have to kill the queen if you want to kill the colony. If you feed the ant something that killed instantly, you would only be killing the larva and the queen would not be affected. Work with fire ant biology and not against it to manage ants. Pouring gasoline on mounds is dangerous and illegal. Other home remedies may not be the best practices either. There can be several different types of fire ant control materials with advantages and disadvantages between the different types. For now, I want to focus on the use of baits. Fire ant bait is made up of a carrier, such as grits, plus a food attractant, such as vegetable oil, plus an insecticide or growth regulator. Keep in mind that grits alone will not manage fire ants. Use fresh baits. The vegetable oil in the bait goes bad when stored over long periods of time or when it is not stored properly, such as allowing it to get too hot. Do not buy bait at the store and let it sit in a hot car. It may not be good when you want to use it. Apply the bait when the workers are actively foraging. The preferred soil temperature range is 70 to 95 degrees. Apply the baits between April 15 and October 15. These dates could be extended if it was warm weather. Apply when the ground is dry and no rain is expected. Use the appropriate equipment when applying baits and use the potato chip test. The potato chip test is a simple way to determine if the ants are actively foraging. The bait is only good for a short period of time after it is spread so the ants need to pick it up quickly. Put a few potato chips out in different areas of the yard and wait 15 minutes. If ants are very active on the chips, then it is a good time to put out the bait. If only one or two ants are on the chips, I would not put out bait at that time. Read and follow directions on the label. The label will tell you how much bait to apply and what sites you can apply the bait. It is very important to read the label before you purchase the product. Many baits are labeled for home turf, but few are labeled for use around fruit orchards or vegetable gardens. Some of the baits labeled for fruit or vegetable gardens are only available in 25 pound containers. The baits do not store well and the large container size is not something needed for small acreage. When ants are foraging, they will travel a long distance to pick up the bait. It is possible to manage ants in gardens and orchards by applying bait around those areas. If you are having trouble deciding on a bait for your location, contact your local extension office. Some bait labels will recommend applying one to two pounds of product per acre. That is about ten flakes of bait per square foot. You are not going to be perfect, but picture A is what you are aiming for. You do not have to cover every square foot of ground. If the ants are actively foraging, they will pick up the bait and bring it back to the colony. What type of equipment is best for spreading fire ant bait? On a small scale of five acres or less, the hen-held spreaders can do a great job. Adjusting the gate and the spinner speed can be tricky. The bait may not flow through the gate if it is only open a little, and too much bait can flow out when opened more. Keep in mind that if you can easily see the bait flowing out of the spreader, you are probably applying too much. There is nothing wrong with applying half the needed amount and going over the area twice. It does not take much time to cover several acres with a hen-held spreader. For large areas of ten acres or more, such as parks, pastures, blueberry farms, or strawberry farms, a larger spreader may be needed. We have fire ant bait spreaders in many extension offices around the state that hook up to ATVs, tractors, and trucks that we loan for people to spread bait. It takes special equipment to spread fire ant bait at one to two pounds per acre. This fire ant bait spreader has an agitator and a blocking plate. That blocking plate will only allow a little bit of fire ant bait to flow through. There are many commercial horticulture resources available. The IPM communicator is an online newsletter that you can sign up for to receive lots of vegetable IPM information along with other horticulture related topics. The Farming Basics online course is a free online resource for commercial horticulture information. The Farming Basics app is a great resource for information on many fruit and vegetable crops as well as insects and disease that may affect those crops. Many educational videos and other helpful information such as fertilizer calculators can be found on this app. Search the Beginning Farmer Farm Project in YouTube and you can watch many commercial horticulture videos. The current version of the Southeastern Vegetable Crop Guidelines book can be found online or by contacting your local commercial horticulture regional extension agent. You can find the contact information for your commercial horticulture agent on our website at aces.edu or by using the Farming Basics app. If you have any questions about fire ant management give us a call at your local extension office.