Fire ants

The first thing you learn about the South is this: they've got bugs. Lots of bugs. Bugs that bite: why, they've got red bugs, mosquitoes that love Yankee flesh and leave welts the size of quarters, and horseflies the size of crickets. But, the worst of the bugs -- at least as far as I have experienced -- is the fire ant.

Fire ants bite. And, their bite is like fire. They inject poison into the skin, poison that lingers below the skin for days and then as the body fights it off, gathers into pustules that last for weeks. I still have marks on my feet that are from biters I got in...August. That's right. It's October and I have marks from August.

So, yesterday, when Bobbie came to "treat our lawn" for moles and armadillos, he wanted to talk to me about our fire ant hills.

He told me a lot about fire ants. We have 3 fire ant hills in our front yard, each of them about a foot in diameter. While most ant hills have a hole at the top of the hill in the middle, fire ants have no such thing. Fire ant hills are highly-organized, sophisticated communities, where different groups of ants have different types of responsibilities. You have the scouts, the food people, the worker ants, the "queen" ants -- more about all these groups later.

Down here, fire ant hills are year round because we don't get enough frost to kill them off. Apparently, the "worker" ants are able to raise and lower their hill in order to moderate hill temperatures. I'm thinking that they lower the hill into the ground during weather extremes, either when it's very cold, in order to keep warmed by the earth, or when it's very hot so that they can stay cooler, protected from the scorching sun and insulated by the cooler dirt around them, and keeping them close to water supplies. Fire ants can burrow down 100 yards below the surface to find water. What happens is the "organizers" will send out "scout" fire ants to look for sources of water and these fire ants are directed to dig and clear until they have created mazes of tunnels beneath the surface, connecting the hill to the water supplies.

Food? I don't know what they eat, but here's HOW they eat. The food is brought into the hill to the "food processor", no not a type of kitchen instrument, but an ant with special gastronomic powers, who takes the food into his extra large lip that serves as a food tray, and after he sprays his special enzymatic juices onto the food in order to break it down digestively, will offer it to the other ants to eat, like a hostess offering hors d'oeuvres at a party. Just another one of the specialties of the fire ant groups. So, we've got the scouts, the food processors and now....

The Queen. Every hill has 3 queens, whose job, like that of a honey bee, is to reproduce. I don't know how long the Queens stay in the hive, but at some appropriate moment there must be an election and one Queen is designated to stay with her hive...while the other Queens "float" to start other hives. Apparently, they don't fly, they "float" and scientists have tracked some Queen fire ants who have floated up to 12 miles away from their original hills.

Pretty impressive social organization, no? But, my respect for their communities is outweighed by my remembrance of their bites -- and I give the go-ahead to Bobbie to exterminate the hills. Hope it works...