Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 13, 1993 TAG: 9304130307
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
FIRE ANTS SAGA IS ENOUGH TO MAKE YOUR SKIN CRAWL
With powerful jaws, they'll chomp down hard; then, with a stinger on their backsides, they'll inject a painful venom. Voracious eaters who consider everything in their path a meal, aggressive by nature, and team players by instinct, they have few natural foes.If they get a hold of you, they'll leave a sore, itchy zit behind that is likely to get infected. It'll leave a scar, too. The miserable little savages won't just bite and sting once. They'll turn and do it again, and again, and again.
Horrible as it sounds, it's always been a distant fear for us, scary but not very close to home - like killer bees or earthquakes.
Fire ants, natives of South America, weren't supposed to stand a snowball's chance in Hades here in the frozen high country of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Winters, surely, would kill them off. Right?
Sorry to disappoint you.
The little land-based piranhas have established a colony in Southwest Roanoke County.
Three years ago, Nancy Cleary planted a dozen or so azaleas on a berm in front of her suburban home, close to the shoulder of Castle Rock Road.
Last autumn, Cleary was weeding near the base of one of the shrubs when a battalion of ants, disturbed by her yardwork, swarmed across a barren patch of crusted dirt.
She collected a few specimens and gave them to Jackie Brown at the Roanoke County Cooperative Extension office.
Brown gave them to Virginia Tech; Tech confirmed the diagnosis - puncturing the conventional wisdom that fire ants have established their only Virginia beachhead in the Tidewater area. The ants have spread along the nation's perimeter since being inadvertently brought to our shores 75 years ago on a freighter.
Cleary's azalea is as far north as they've come along the Eastern Seaboard.
The find was nothing to diddle with.
Fire ants will eat the buds off fruit trees. They'll wipe out other ants and devour earthworms, chew the meat off roadkill, dine on animal droppings and have their way with field mice. They'll eat into electrical systems and fry the air conditioners.
In some places, fire ants are considered a blessing. They can wipe out weevils and borers, earworms and other agricultural pests. Of course, with the pests go the lady bugs, the bees and the tiny wasps that are considered beneficial.
Having given that obligatory fair shake to this heinous varmint, I advise you now to dismiss it. Root for the chemical equivalent of the hydrogen bomb to fall on fire ants. There's no proven, absolute way to stop them.
Wasting no time, with the season's first stretch of warm days arousing the ants from their winter sloth, a special-tactics team swooped down on Cleary's front yard on Monday.
Charlie Magolda wanted to stir the barbarous beasts. He kicked the nest, scooped an ant and let it bite the back of his hand.
Bill Zimmerman, like Magolda a worker for the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, cautiously sprinkled yellow granules of Amdro onto Cleary's lawn from a coffee can.
His tablespoon scattered less Amdro than you would sprinkle grated Parmesan on your spaghetti.
It's a powerful poison - bait that he hopes the ants will carry back into the colony to feed to the queen and to millions of larvae.
How big might the nest be?
Five, maybe six feet underground.
"Hopefully," said Zimmerman, "this is an isolated case."
But this is the time of year that a fire-ant queen may bolt from the main colony, mate in mid-air, and drop to the ground to establish a new headquarters. That may already have happened.
Zimmerman doesn't plan to try to trace the ants' path into Roanoke County. Most likely, they hitchhiked in the root ball of Nancy Cleary's azalea.
"Millions and millions of nursery plants are coming up from the South this time of year," said Zimmerman. "There's no way to check all of them."
He'll be checking the plain mound of brown earth every two weeks. If, by Memorial Day, the fire ants are still prospering along Castle Rock Road, he'll use a stronger insecticide to kill them.
Zimmerman fights his battle on Nancy Cleary's lawn for all of us. If he wins, we've won some time; if he loses, all we love and cherish is lost, too.
Well, maybe not that bad. But we'll have to be on our toes for more than just mosquitoes and poison ivy.