REM 3200
US Veteran
My experience with fire ant bites is they can take as long as 2 weeks to completely heal. They are not your average insect bite. And they are bites, not stings. As far as getting rid of the fire ant mounds, there are products that will kill an individual mound. Orthene works well on a mound. However, getting rid of them completely is an entirely different story. You kill one mound, others will simply show up somewhere else. Fire ant colonies are huge, with the bulk of them underground. Texas A&M is trying to find a way to achieve some level of control over fire ants. Complete (temporary) eradication requires use of baits (Amdro, e.g.) by you and your neighbors over a large area and an extended period of time. This is a difficult problem and complete eradication is probably never going to happen.
Texas A&M and others have been working on it since the 1930s when fire ants entered the US thru the Port of Mobile from South America. The EPA has banned most of the effective poisons.