Fire Ant Not-So-Fun Facts:

• The queen fire ant is an egg-laying machine and a single queen produces more than 1,500 eggs per day.
• Thousands of fire ants live in just one colony. Single queen colonies may have 40-150 mounds and up to 7 million ants per acre. In multiple queen colonies, there could be more than 200 mounds and up to 40 million ants per acre!
• Fire ant mounds are like ice bergs – most of the nest is below the ground – in an elaborate network of underground tunnels up to 10’ deep.
• They have no naturally occurring enemy in this country.
• Besides new queens flying to neighboring properties to mate and start new colonies, fire ants are imported by transported nursery stock or sod.
• Fire ants will eat through power lines, wreak havoc with lights, junction boxes, and air conditioning equipment, and cause damage to machinery, irrigation, and transformer boxes.
• Fire ants are extremely aggressive, with hundreds swarming out of a mound and stinging within seconds.
• A single fire ant encounter can leave a victim with dozens of stings and cause serious problems, sending thousands every year to seek medical attention, or even causing death, in people and animals.
• In order to ship nursery plants to some other states, you need a Fire Ant Stamp.
• In heavy rain, fire ants will go to higher ground.  And if there is no ground, they will create rafts and chains to ground using their bodies (hundreds and thousands of bodies).

It is very important to know the difference between fire ants and pyramid ants. Click here for a great explanation from one of our sister companies.