Ant bites: Help!

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.
 
I work in the soil here much of the time and often fail to wear gloves. I have had thousands of fire ant bites over the years. They typically take several days to heal up. You might speed it up by taking a needle and letting the fluid out of the little white pustule that forms, and putting some Neosporin on them, but I usually just ignore them till they heal.

Oh yeah I be not a doctor so don’t be taking this as medical advice. LOL And don't try and sue me if your hand falls off.

They are just illegal aliens from South America, so please know our government is working on the problem.
 
Good luck Texas Star....ant's bites can be problematic..Try to catch one (if not already done) and identify the species can help in the future...bites.
R.
 
Grandma used to dab them with ammonia. It seemed to work but it was done right after the bite. I don't know if it would do you any good at this point.

I hate those little bleepers.

Ammonia is a base and bases work well for most bites/stings if applied right away (BTW: Urine is good for jellyfish stings. We used it in Belize and it does work)
 
Messing with the mounds just makes them spread. And if you keep scratching, they'll take longer to heal and scratching doesn't help the itching.

They would eventually make their way back from mounds in neighboring yards, but a BBQ propane tank and a 500,000 btu torch (I upgraded from a mere 50,000 btu) killed off every fire ant mound in my yard when I lived in SC.
 
Years ago there was a product called--Stop Alert--and the main ingredient was Dairy Cow Urine. It worked very well for me. It's not available any more and I wonder why. It seemed safe to use.
 
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