Fire Ants

One of the things that I do not like about where we live (and there aren't many things that fall into the 'dislike' category) are fire ants. I had never experienced these nasty little bugs until moving to North Carolina. They are horrible! And their mounds seem to pop up whenever we have a lot of rain. I don't know if they get flooded from their old nests or if the soil is softened so they can make new ones. Whatever it is, the mounds seem to pop up over night sometimes. I walked through one mound that was hidden in the grass while mowing and had about 20 of them crawling up my ankles and biting me. Let me tell you, those little buggers hurt! This picture shows you an untouched mound, and then I poked a hole in it. You can kind of see them boiling up and out of the nest, and all those little rice-like things are eggs. Yuck. I snapped a picture first, but then I dumped in some fire ant poison. Die, fire ants, die!