Hi Sammy,

I don't have the wooley aphids here so can't help you there, or with the asian lady beetles that follow them.

However, I have had to deal with fire ants since the early to mid-1980s, so I am pretty experienced in dealing with them.

Fire ants do not pose much of a threat to the average person. Their stings hurt...they do burn like fire for a brief period. You get raised-up pustules at the site of each bite, but they don't especially itch or hurt and they go away after a few days.

The people who have bad reactions to fire ants have those reactions because they are allergic to the fire ant bites. A fire ant allergy can express itself in several ways, and I am basing this on various people I know who have had severe reactions.

In some people, a fire ant allergy causes huge hives and these hives hurt them much more than the typical little pustule hurts a non-allergic person. Whereas most people get the little pustules, some highly allergic people get big purplish swellings that are about the color of the skin of a purple plum and look like a marble underneath your skin. One of our son's childhood friends had this kind of reaction back in the years when they were in elementary school in the early 1990s. He had lots of other allergies and saw an allergist regularly, but I never could tell that his allergic reactions decreased in frequency or intensity.

Other people have intense pain that doesn't fade quickly, itching, abnormal swelling that may include the whole leg or arm which was bitten, dizziness, heart palpitations, and even sometimes they have trouble breathing. In other words, some of them go into anaphylactic shock just like people do when they are severely allergic to bee stings. If getting bitten by fire ants causes this reaction in a person, they should seek medical treatment immediately.

I keep liquid Benadryl on hand at all times because it begins working very quickly to counter the effects of an insect sting/bite that is causing a severe reaction. None of us in our family are strongly allergic to fire ants, but remember that allergic reactions tend to develop after repeated exposure so you can't assume just because you've never strongly reacted before that you won't react this time.

Also, you can obtain quick relief from fire ant bites by mixing baking soda and water to form a paste and plastering that paste over each bite. That is what the Poison Control Center told me to do when Chris stepped in a fire ant mound when he was 13 months old and was outside at grandma and grandpa's house splashing in puddles after a big thunderstorm. It worked for him then--he had several dozen bites on him as did his grandpa who rescued him from the mound--and we've used it ever since. I also gave him liquid Benadryl at the direction of the Poison Control Center and, between the Benadryl and the baking soda paste, he didn't even get very many of those little pustules in comparison to how many ants we knocked off his little legs and feet.

For fire ants in your vegetable and fruit growing areas, you can treat the ground with an organic fire ant killer that has spinosad as the active ingredient. I have used this kind of fire ant killer in my veggie garden for several years and it is pretty effective.

In areas where you are not growing edible crops, there are several very effective fire ant products you can use that are chemically based. If you prefer to remain organic, I use one called "Come and Get It" (made by Fertilome) that is very effective, but it is hard to find. You may have to order it online if you don't have a full-line nursery near you that carries a lot of organic products. We also have used a chemical product (NOT near the house, veggie garden or fruit trees, but in areas further away from all of them) called "Over and Out" that was very effective and seemed to have a longer residual effect that any other product we'd tried.

Based on my 25 years or so experience with fire ants, I'd say that the Texas Two Step Method is definitely the most effective way to control fire ants, to the extent that they can be controlled at all. You can read about the Texas Two-Step method below and you can do the organic version or the chemical version.

Over the long term, improving your soil lessens the amount of fire ants you'll have. However, some years when their populations are heavy, I have just as many in the areas where the soil has been heavily improved as I do in poor soil.

Here is a link that might be useful: Texas A&M Fire Ant Website