Crazy Rasberry ants are causing a wave of damage and untold problems for home owners in Texas and look set to spread their way across the Southern States. What can be done to stop them?
How to Kill Crazy Rasberry Ants
With the warm humid weather of summer fast approaching, the best advice is to act now before the problem gets even worse. However, killing crazy rasberry ants is a very tough task. Because they breed so fast, poison is not effective (particularly the over the counter poison). The poison does its job on the first wave of ants but after that, the ants simply walk on top of the other dead crazy rasberry ants. It’s also no use killing the queen. Each colony of crazy rasberry ants has a number of queens.
The only way to get some relief from the problem is to call in experienced exterminators who have access to stronger chemicals and will have more experience dealing with them. Even so, it will still be a challenge. Try to involve your neighbors in eradicating the ants. Unless the exterminators are working on their property as well, the infestation of crazy rasberry ants is likely to recur again sooner or later.
Pictures of Crazy Rasberry Ants show them to be smaller than regular ants (little larger than a flea) and reddish brown in color. Because of their slightly raspberry color, people often call them crazy raspberry ants. But the real name comes from Tom Rasberry, who was the first person to spot crazy rasberry ants in the Texas. The ‘crazy’ part of ‘crazy rasberry ants’ comes from their movement. They dance around in a seemingly random manner. Spin and darting all over the place with no clear direction or intention.
Crazy Rasberry Ants have become famed for eating electrical equipment from wiring, to TVs, to iPods. No one is quite sure why they do this.
What Makes Crazy Rasberry Ants Dangerous?
Their erratic behavior means that many people underestimate Crazy Rasberry Ants. But they don’t make that mistake too long. Crazy Rasberry Ants breed at a ferocious rate. Thousands upon thousands of them can appear overnight. Unlucky house owners that have found themselves with a crazy rasberry ant infestation end up shovelling them up by the thousands.
Crazy Rasberry Ants are so voracious and overwhelming that they are even displacing other types of ants. Fire ants, long the bane of many Texan’s summer, have been almost wiped out in some counties of Houston because they have been overwhelmed by the influx of crazy rasberry ants. This, at least, is some reason to thank them. Crazy rasberry ant bites are not harmful and don’t sting like fire ants do.
The best solution, as always, is to prevent a crazy rasberry ant infestation in the first place. Luckily, although their spread is relentless, it is quite slow. The most likely way to spread them is through soil and such from the Houston area. If you’ve had a delivery of soil or plant material from the Houston area and you think it might have been carrying crazy rasberry ants don’t delay. Get it checked out by an expert immediately. Your neighbors certainly won’t thank you if you’re the source of an outbreak of Crazy Rasberry Ants.
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Comments
To the best of my knowledge the only ants in an ant-collony producing female hormones are the queens. If this is the case then one would think that a poison or sterilisation agent could be developed that uses these hormones to attack only the queens. I imagine that this could be by using such hormones to activate the agent or to build up an effective quantity of the agent in the queens. Such an agent would have no effect on normal, “male” ants, who would carry the agent to the queens with impunity. Furthermore, if such an agent could be made bio-degradeable then its use could be seasonally adjusted to minimise the damage to other species and the environment.
