Fire Ants and Honey Bees in Texas

Fire ants don’t bring down a healthy hive. A full-strength colony covers its own entrance and turns scouts back before they organize a raid. Where the ants pour in, you’ll find a colony that was already in trouble. It went queenless, came up short on bees, or got bled down by mites. Across the eastern two-thirds of Texas they’re a permanent part of the yard. The job comes down to keeping colonies strong and putting a barrier between the ants and the hives.

This entry is part of the Honey Outlaws threats encyclopedia. Get those two things right and the ants never amount to more than a nuisance.

Where Fire Ants Live in Texas

Fire ants reached the US from South America in the 1930s. They spread until the climate stopped them. In Texas that means the eastern two-thirds of the state. Texas A&M AgriLife places them mainly in that band. The arid Trans-Pecos, far West Texas, and much of the Panhandle stay largely clear. It’s too dry out there for the ant to hold ground. The federal quarantine on moving soil and nursery stock covers only the infested counties. If your bees sit anywhere from the Hill Country east, you’re in fire ant country, and you won’t clear them out of it.

A single fire ant colony runs from tens of thousands of workers into the hundreds of thousands. The queen’s chamber sits deep underground, beneath the mound. Through the warm Texas year the workers stay surface-active. The colony’s foragers range wide, easily reaching a hive stand fifty feet away from the mound. Mounds turn up fast, too. Knock one down and the ants rebuild it, sometimes inside two weeks when the weather suits them.

How a Raid Starts

The ants don’t sense a hive from across the yard. They forage more or less at random, then recruit hard once a scout hits something worth taking. A hive is worth taking. It holds honey, brood, and the dead bees on the bottom board. That scent pulls foragers in once they’re close. A scout that finds a way in lays a pheromone trail home, and the workers come up it. The way in is almost always the bottom board, down where a thin cluster has pulled up off the floor.

In a strong hive that recruitment hits a wall of bees. Guards hold the entrance in numbers. They kill scouts faster than a trail can build, and the raid falls apart before it starts. A weak hive has no wall to offer. Thinned out by a heavy mite load, a failed queen, or a hard winter, the bees can’t cover their own door. The ants get through. They carry off brood, rob what honey they reach, and kill the adult bees that can’t get clear. Left under that pressure, the hive absconds.

Fire ants aren’t a reportable pest. The Texas Apiary Inspection Service tracks the pests and diseases that travel between colonies, like American foulbrood and tropilaelaps. The ants aren’t on that list. Texas leaves them to the beekeeper, a problem you handle in the yard.

A Strong Colony Is the First Defense

So when the ants show up at a hive, look at the colony first. Check the mite load. Is the queen laying a solid pattern? Did the hive come out of winter short on bees? Whatever you find driving the weakness is what to fix. Keep varroa under threshold and requeen anything that won’t recover. That holds your colonies at the strength where they keep their own door. When you see a fire ant raid, it points back at the colony, the same as chalkbrood or a spotty brood pattern does.

Strength comes first, but hive stands still need a barrier. A big mound can set up right under one. If the ants climb the legs unchecked, they reach the entrance in numbers no colony should fight off day after day. A nuc or a fresh package is small by design, not weak, but the ants don’t draw that line. An undersized colony needs the barrier as much as a failing one. The bees hold the door, and the barrier keeps the ants off it.

“Fire ants don’t raid strong colonies. They move in on the weak ones. If they’re getting in, the colony is the thing to fix.”

Barriers on the Stand

A hive stand barrier stops the ants on the legs, before they reach the hive. In our yards we run CatchMaster Insect Barrier Adhesive, a sticky band around each leg an ant won’t cross. It holds as long as it stays clean. Grass, leaf litter, and windblown debris bridge a sticky band fast, and a bridged band stops nothing. We check ours every few weeks, and after any storms or high winds that might have piled trash against the legs. This stuff doesn’t slip or run, even in the Texas heat. Hands down the best insect glue around.

Other keepers do it other ways that work. Legs set in cups of motor oil drown any ant that crosses. Petroleum jelly cut with diatomaceous earth holds up well in the heat, but the diatomaceous earth is hard on any bee that touches it, so it stays off the hive. All these solutions run on the same idea. Put something between the ants and the legs, and keep it up. When dealing with fire ants, nothing is set it and forget it.

Watch the ground under the stands while you’re at it. A mound that sets up at the base of a hive is one that will constantly harass it. Knock new mounds down as you find them. Track where they keep coming back. A mound that rebuilds in the same spot twice has a queen the surface never reached, and that’s the one to bait.

Bait That Takes the Whole Colony

Knock a mound down and you kill workers, but the queen keeps laying. To kill the colony you have to reach the queen, and you reach her with bait.

The Station We Run

In our own yards we bait with boric acid worked into Crisco, set out in a closed station. The shortening makes a grease bait the foragers will carry. The boric acid kills slowly, so they share it around the nest by trophallaxis before it acts. It reaches the queen and the brood, and the whole colony goes down. The closed station matters as much as the mix. It holds the bait dry through dew and rain. And it keeps the boric acid off the bees and the other insects that have no business in it.

If you’d rather run a registered product, the standard Texas approach is the two-step method from Texas A&M AgriLife. You broadcast a granular bait across the area, then treat the mounds that stay active. Whatever bait you choose, keep it well off the hive and out of the bees’ flight path. Put it down when the foragers are home. A bee that picks up a bait granule is a bee you poisoned yourself.

What you never do is spray. Pyrethroids and organophosphates kill foragers on contact. The residue lingers on the leaves and grass the bees land on. There’s no taking that back once it’s in your hives.

Fire ants are a permanent part of beekeeping in this stretch of Texas. You won’t clear them out of the county, and you don’t have to. A strong colony, a maintained and defensive hive stand, and a station for the mounds that won’t quit will keep your bees clear of them. None of it matters as much as the first one. Our beekeeping philosophy starts with colonies hardy enough to hold their own ground, fire ants and all. For the rest of what threatens a Texas hive, work through the Honey Outlaws threats encyclopedia.