Hey All,

Earlier this Spring I noticed a fairly well established ant colony in my yard. It's deep enough to where my foot sinks slightly when I step on it. I can stick my dandelion popper into the ground there without effort at least two feet straight down.

They're black ants, but I don't think they are carpenter ants because carpenter ants don't nest in the soil. Could be wrong on that though.

Anyone here have any suggestions for eliminating the nest? Can anyone recommend any products I could use?

I'm not too keen on just leaving them there. I'm resisting the 12 year old in my head telling me to grab a shovel and start digging just to eff with them.

Thanks for the tips.

Firecrackers and gas!

In Texas, my dad used to kill fire ants with a type of poison that the workers would take down to the queen. Anything you do to the surface won't touch her... as long as the queen lives, you'll have the problem. Queen dies, mound dies; then you get to rebuild your lawn.

Bastards. At least fire ants build mounds. Sounds like yours have dug out a nice depression!

That was probably Amdro.

I know there is a poison that somehow attaches to the ants and they take and spread it back to the queen, killing the nest. I myself like to use fire.

I don't think I would dig it up. You probably do have to buy some type of insecticide bait that they bring back into the colony killing the queen.

It might also be a trial and error type thing. The first product you use may not work, but another bait might work.

Since it's in the ground, you could use boiling water. Ants will survive regular water, but an awful lot of boiling water will kill many of them.

Rinse and repeat.

You could rent an anteater from the local zoo? They eat 15000 ants a day! That's a deep nest, not sure what the best way to get them all would be. I just killed several nest of large black ants in my yard by using copious amounts of Seven Dust over the area. Haven't seen any ants since. Good luck.

Just googling Amdro and it comes back as a primary weapon against fire ants.

Anyone use this stuff against other kinds of ants?

I'd think it would work for all ant colonies but what do I know.

x2 on Amdro... works great here.

If Amdro ever starts sucking for any of you with fire ants, get some Ortho Orthene. That shit is some nasty, nasty stuff. It kills them dead, and quick. The smell might run them off by itself.

I've had great success with Amdro, however with small ants they won't take the Bait. Pun intended.

I've had good luck with Ortho ant powder for the smaller guys.

Both seem to be less effective when they get wet or old.

I've always wanted to try the Malt-o-meal trick. Supposedly they eat it and when they drink water, they'll blow up internally.

sprinkle boric acid powder on the mound, or any mound you find. Ants take it back inside and will kill them all in a couple days.

Ortho insecticide.

We have carpenter ants in this area and a builder told us he uses Aspertane to get rid of em... we all were like WHAT. Well we used it and we have not seen a carpenter ant in 2 years now after 2 treatments.

If you want to go all natural, diatomaceous earth works wonders. Suffocates them. If you know someone with a diatomaceous earth swimming pool filter, just be there the next time they back flush it - all the DE powder you could want for free.

Otherwise for small black ants, I like Terro . Wiped out one colony already this spring, now I have one more to go...

AMDRO is the best I use to sell it when I worked at Ace hardware customers loved it Conundrum is right the little ants wont touch it because the grains are to big so get two boards and crush some of it up into a powder so the little ones will take it. It works have told many a customer to do this and I have done it myself. Do not Eff with them they could bite or sting you. There is a old trick borax soap with sugar mixed together that I have heard works. But with a colony of that size you need amdro.
Good luck!!

Grits.

Same way we got rid of a huge bee nest in the ground. A couple gallons of gas and a flare. Spread the gas liberally around the colony and toss the flare in from a safe distance. Worked great with the bees, a few got out but they were on fire while they were flying. Would have looked cool at night.

I've used Amdro and it worked great. It needs to be fresh, and it needs to be kept dry. With a really big colony, I would probably burn them with gasoline first, but that's just me.

If you have pets or kids, be careful: Amdro can be fatal.

I'll second NYMM. Sounds funny, but it works great without having to put out poison.

We have a little garden area in the back yard. I was weeding one day and saw a few large ants around a flag stone. I tipped the stone over and holy shit, a billion of those things went ape shit. I could see they had quite a few tunnels all about.

Went into the house, filled up the spaghetti pot, brought it to a nice boil and poured it on the hole.

No more ants.

I also heard you can shovel some off the top and throw them away. Ants leave a trail when they leave the nest to know how to come back. If you throw them 30 feet away with the shovel, they won't find their way back and they'll die. If you do that, you can make somewhat of a whole on top of the nest so that the boiling water pools and sinks here as opposed to run off.

56kz2slow has got something there with their trail they actually if I remember right they leave a ammonia(sp) trail and you can use windex or lysol to destroy the trail so they get lost.

I use to have a really bad ant problem at my old place. I tried a lot of different products. The only one that actually worked was Terro bait:

http://www.terro.com/products.php?product=liquid_ant_bait

I actually can't believe how well it worked. The link is to their indoor bait which I used. If their outdoor bait works half as well as their indoor bait, it will solve your problems.

Just as a follow up:

I bucked up for that Amdro stuff even though it was 4 times as expensive as everything else on the shelf (still not bad at $12).

It came in a 24 ounce container and the directions said I only needed 2 ounces to eliminate a whole colony, so I was kinda skeptical, but I followed directions.

Immediately after sprinkling the stuff I saw ants picking it up and dragging it down their holes. There's a real insidious side to me that really loved watching that scene go down.

Day 2: I go back to the nest and notice a lot of the pellets still there, so I'm thinking they didn't take much of the bait. Then I disturbed the nest, something that would ordinarily result in 100 black ants pouring out. Nothing. Not a single ant showed up to defend the nest.

Flash forward to Day 7: the nest appears to be completely abandoned. I'm also finding dead ants along the floor boards of the house. I'm guessing these are ants that deserted the nest and are on their own, dying in the process because they need that whole nest structure to eat and live.

Gotta give this Amdro stuff my 5 Star Lead Pipe Lock Two Thumbs Up personal guarantee.

Not sure if anyone still really cares but I'll be dilligent with this thread in case someone calls it up via the archive:

I walked by that ant nest last night and noticed a skeleten crew of ants rebuilding new holes. "Insurgents" as I like to call them.

I called in another round of Amdro pellet bombing immediately.

With rain in the forecast for this afternoon, these insurgents keep getting lucky because the pellets keep getting rained on after a day, negating the poison.

Heard a 1/4 stick of Dynamite does the trick!