Taking care of the fire ants.......

[cooperhawk]

One day I was mowing down by our dock and I thought someone was shooting me in the butt with a BB gun.
Turned out it was those damn little bees living in the ground. After they got me a few times I let the lawn
mower idle over their nest while I went and got a can of gas. Revenge is so sweet.

[BrokenolMarine]

Another very bad one to watch out for are yellowjackets. They live under ground and can have a very large honey bee comb type nest always with a back door. I have run a lawn mower over them on two occasions and was bitten before I knew what was going on. A little powerful insect spray at dawn when they are in the nest or I have seen a pro come at dawn with a weed burner shot down in the whole and that did the job.

I got caught by ground nesting yellow jackets once on the farm in VA. We had a pair of Oaks in the front yard, between the deck and the boathouses. We had surrounded them with Rip Rap to define Tina's flower bed, backfilled with topsoil and planted lillies and whatever else she decided. The other landscaping in the front yard was surrounded by the rip rap as well to keep the mulch at bay.

ramp bed mulched.jpg (236.15 KiB) Viewed 420 times

Five years later, Miss Tina decided that she was tired of weedeating around the rip rap borders, so I was loading the rip rap into the dump trailer and hauling it to the bottom of the drive and dumping it down either side of the culvert over the creek the drive crossed. Not wasted. I pulled up one particularly large stone and all the sudden the air raid siren went off in the yellow jacket den.... they streamed out like cartoon hornets. I headed for safety in the spa on the deck... luckily to top was up and I was underwater in a heartbeat. I got about five stings... That was about FIVE more than I wanted.

I stayed under for about 90 seconds and then popped up, out, and right in the front door. Miss T gave me a ration for dripping all over the carpet until she saw the swarm around the spa. That even, just before dark, I poured about a pint of dawn and gas mixture down the hole, dribbled a bit away and tossed a long match used for lighting the woodstove over... WUFF... I swear I felt it at the deck. No more yellow jackets.

I wore long sleeves and gloves for the rest of that job, even though it was summer. There were a lot of beds surrounded by rip rap, but I was younger then, and not so broken. Plus, I paced myself. It still sucked.

BTW, that is the same bed that Miss T worked barefoot in and got bitten by a juvenile copperhead the next year. Karma, she is a beotch.

[BrokenolMarine]

I saw a video on YouTube where a European guy poured WAY too much gas down a nest in his small back yard, and threw the match... blew up the back yard. Cracked the patio, turned over the dog house, and blew his grass five feet in the air. I think I remember it cracking his sliding glass door. He poured a LOT of gas down that hold in a very small back yard.

[Mags]

I've gotten hit a few times by ground nesting yellow jackets. Diesel down the hole and lit is sweet revenge.