North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>]

    Limonene works against fire ants??!!   That explains the product I heard of that seemed to disappear off t.he market, that used citrus to dissolve their exoskeletons, then molasses to get microorganisms to attack them.  Limonene is one thing I could spray no problem.  When my chemical sensitivities were at their worst, I used to carry dried tangerine peels in my pocket to help my liver deal with exposures.  The limonene in orange, tangerine, and lemon peels speeds up liver detox.  It's a degreaser, so chewing these peels degreases your tongue.  I'd chew up just enough to make my tongue tingle, and the weirdness from diesal fumes or whatever would go away quickly.  Would limonene work on curculio??  I could not only spray the stuff, I could breathe it and dance in the drips.  Mind you, it's not good for everyone.  If you don't like the smell, it's bad for you and you should stay away from it.  I have slow phase 1 and 2 detox.  Limonene speeds up Phase 1, so for people with slow Phase 2 and rapid Phase 1, it can make them worse.  It speeds up 3 or 4 of the 6 Phase 2 systems, but if you are stuck in one of the Phase 2's that the limonene doesn't help... well it will smell bad to you. 

    My parents have a solar water heater and when the fire ants get too numerous my mom hooks up a hose to the utility sink and runs hot water down their holes.  When we rented a house in central Florida my husband would boil up a kettle of water every day and go pour it down a fire ant nest.  There was Amdro in the shed but we never used it, and when the owner came down from up north he was very puzzled to see so few fire ant hills.  Apparently they had never achieved such good control using the chemical. 

    I have heard really weird stories too, about people putting sugar out in quantity and the fire ants disappearing, and one about a guy who spat on ants while brushing his teeth and when the ants died, used a spray of diluted toothpaste with good effect.  Fluoride is pretty poisonous.  Oh, Aspartame is said to kill them too, supposedly someone was packaging it for bug spray. 

    We have a friend from around Austin TX who says that the fire ants have killed about everything else.  There are no reptiles, no amphibians, no birds, just fire ants.  But there is hope.  Just as fruit from other continents did well for many years before our bugs and diseases evolved to attack them, so the fire ants and the Japanese beetles have spread rapidly and become dominant species till  the sheer magnitude of their success doomed them.  Sort of like the viruses attacking Internet Explorer, sort of like the inevitable fate of the now ubiqitous human race.  There is a bug in Brazil that keeps fire ants under control there, a slow business to test and possibly introduce.  But in Florida they have found a fungus that weakens fire ant colonies, and that is legal to spread because it's already here in the wild.  Donna