You never get bitten by just one.
We’ve been getting a lot of rain so the fire ant mounds are yuge. I poisoned over 30 mounds last week and there are at least ten new ones. I think that fire ant poison is krap. Gasoline is best but kills the grass.
Yup, they can sneak up on you, you’ll have them all over your legs before they start biting. It’s happened to me many times. I’m in Riverside county now, but we also had them when I lived in east Los Angeles county too.
And if you do, you get bitten twice because they bite you and sting you at the same time.
And these things are mean. They don't need to be provoked like wasps do. They attack as soon as they touch your body.
Dealt with fire ants repeatedly in Florida. Fortunately, never stepped on a mound but the ones and twos that got inside were a real nuisance.
>> You never get bitten by just one.
Not exactly true. Just today, I was picking okra in the garden when I finally realized that the persistent burn where two of my fingers meet was not okra spines but a single vicious and very determined fire ant! Little bastid.
But you’re basically right: when you tangle with a mound, they DO tend to climb on you en masse and once in place they share a pheromone that causes them ALL to sting in unison. (They don’t bite, they sting. They do clamp onto you with their jaws to give them leverage to sting.)