You know those YouTube videos that somehow appear in your feed? Yeah, those. Well, the other day, one such video popped up in my feed.
Apparently this young man has made a nice little YouTube career out of evicting invasive fire ants from backyards. How does he do this?
The dude POURS MOLTEN ALUMINUM IN THE ANT HILLS!
That’s right, those fire ants better watch out for that hot pour of hot aluminum in their homes.
This guy pours the aluminum in, then digs out the hardened aluminum structure – and washes it off – and displays the aluminum creation as art. In fact, you can even see black spots on the aluminum framework – those are the carbonized ashes of fire ants who couldn’t get away in time. Oops.
Here’s an example of his work.
Holy Uncle Milton, Batman.
So who needs pest control trucks? Get yourself some aluminum bars, a home forge, some propane, and just roast those bad boys until they get the message. You got ants? Melt them with aluminum. You got wasps in your yard? Introduce them to molten aluminum.
Are you tired of yellowjackets finding holes in your backyard and turning them into their own private hacienda? You know what you can do with those yellowjackets? That’s right, a good dose of molten aluminum should take care of that.
Now, before you do some self-taught smelting, be aware of a few things. Any moisture in the ground can cause molten aluminum to explode in the earth, either shooting straight down – or blasting straight up, like a geyser. And you do NOT want to get molten aluminum on your face or in your eye. No you do not.
Also, once you’ve poured the aluminum and it hardens, you now have to dig out your creation. You have to dig a hole that’s twice as wide as the surface area of your initial pour. You have to soak the ground with enough water to wash away as much dirt as possible, so that you can somehow extract your molten creation from the earth. And these things must be done delicately, lest you accidentally snap off one of those ant trails.
Yeah, you may have a nice anthill sculpture, but you also have a gaping hole in your backyard, and you now have to explain to your significant other why there’s a moon crater just a few feet from her hyacinths.
Oh, and one more thing. If you’re going to do with this with invasive species, you be you. But there are also YouTube clips out there of people using this aluminum technique to pour on honeybee hives, in rabbit holes, in cricket habitats, and the like. Yeah, I’m not linking any of those videos to this post. Have some common sense and respect for nature if you’re going to do this.
But yeah, this definitely has to fit into the category of backwoods redneck ingenuity.
I wonder what the next evolution of this might be. Liquid lucite in the hole? Plaster? Concrete? Dental Jeltrate?
Nah, maybe not dental jeltrate. That’s reserved for making molds of other hole-drilling creatures.
Chuck The Writer 