If you're moving bees to California next spring, and are now in a Fire Ant area, start now to get rid of the number one border crossing problem.
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New Fire Ant Control

Gel Bait Created to Control Fire Ant Invasion

WATERBURY, Connecticut, June 12, 2003 (ENS) - A new product to control fire ants by feeding them is about to reach the market. The bait gel developed jointly by U.S. Agricultural Research Service scientists and Waterbury Companies appeals to fire ants but kills them.
Waterbury Companies will sell the new bait gel as Drax NutraBait later this month pending Environmental Protection Agency registration.

Fire ants are thought to have been introduced into the United States during the 1930s at the seaport of Mobile, Alabama. Today the imported ants have become a serious problem in Texas, Southern California, Florida and many other areas throughout the southern United States.

Fire ants infest pastures, croplands, citrus groves, golf courses, lawns and flowerbeds. Among other things, they will sting humans or animals, remove bark from young trees, and build mounds up to 18 inches high that makes cultivation of crops difficult and expensive.

Cases have been reported of fire ants infesting livestock feed and orange groves so heavily that workers have refused to enter to pick the fruit for fear of being stung.

The Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research agency, and Waterbury applied for a joint patent on the bait gel formulation, which mixes carbohydrates, lipids and proteins that are eaten by fire ants. That is a first, according to Guadalupe Rojas, an entomologist at the ARS Southern Regional Research Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Rojas and ARS entomologist Juan Morales-Ramos began working on the new formula about three years ago to lure the tiny, stinging pests away from bait traps intended to kill Formosan subterranean termites. Both pests are targets of large scale research and control projects in the southeast.

The final product is a weather resistant, yellow gel that can be squeezed onto both flat and vertical surfaces. It contains five percent boric acid, which, in tests, killed fire ant colonies in two months or less, depending on their size and the season.

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Kim Flottum
Editor, Bee Culture Magazine
http://www.beeculture.com/beeculture/index.html