Snakes. Gators! Gracious!
Posted on 08/29/2017 1:57:08 AM PDT by Daffynition
Houston, Texas is only beginning to take stock of the damage Hurricane Harvey has inflicted. But now the city has another problem on its hands.
Floating colonies of fire ants, as many as 500,000 in one group, are banding together to stay above water in flood-wracked Houston—and they bite, according to Houstonia magazine, though no one has been bitten yet amid Houston’s flooding
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
Snakes. Gators! Gracious!
That’s why I keep big hanging baskets of impatiens around. The plant is excellent for taking the sting out of fire ant bites and a one-time application will prevent scabs and itching on the bite sites.
I, for one, welcome our new Fire Ant overlords...
really
Yes... common garden impatiens... works on spider bites, scorpion stings, bee and wasp stings too ... though you have to hold the mashed stems & leaves on a little longer- very soothing. Works faster than drug store sprays. Works instantly on fire ant stings... unless they have scabbed over...in which case to stop the itching you have to break the scab to get the juice in.
Even more powerful is the wild impatiens called jewelweed - impatiens capensis. It is excellent for taking the itch out of poison ivy rashes as well.
Great info. Thank you!
so you get the stems, and leaves and just rub them on?
UN condemnation coming because Trump hasn’t spoken out strongly enough against fire ants.
I didn’t know ants can swim.
In a city of 6 million plus, how in the world would the typist of this article know that no one has been bitten yet? Those floating fire ant mounds are extremely dangerous. Once the mound collides with something solid (car, house, person, etc...) the ants are extremely pissed off and swarm the object. I saw a couple of guy in kayaks in a creek during a flood here in Austin many years ago who learned that the hard way.
I’m glad to see that you know the difference between a sting and a bite, unlike the writer of this article who falsely states about fire ants that they bite. I may just be a grumpy old man but I have always figured that if a person can’t get a minor detail right and doesn’t seem to care then you have to doubt everything they tell you.
I have seen this before in local flooding, the ants gather in a ball and keep rotating between the top and bottom so that they don’t drown. If you are in a boat and one of these floats by you can see the ants constantly changing position. You are right, they float rather than swim, any ant who loses his grip on the mass is likely to drown. By the way, fire ants STING, they don’t bite as the author falsely states.
Great info, thanks for posting. Do you make a poultice ?
More fake news. Not the part about there being all those fire ants but that no one being bitten yet.
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