I’ll have a picture later, but right now all I can do is describe it.
We’ve seen three of these. They’ve ranged from about half an inch to about an inch long. They are dark reddish brown, but have a distinctive yellow circle around the abdomen.
They either bite or sting. We think they sting. And when they do whatever they do, it hurts really, really badly.
And they survive quite a few seconds of active, intense crushing.
We live in north Texas–not panhandle north, rather, north (and a little west) of D/FW.
I’ve seen fire ants, and somehow never noticed the stripe on the abdomen. But I’m not sure this was a fire ant. It didn’t look like a fire ant to me. It was too dark, and it doesn’ thave a giant head. (That’s how I’ve always identified them–by the giant head.)
Your critter is up to an inch long, and the thing that indicates to you that it’s not a fire ant is its color and the fact that it doesn’t have a giant head? Around these parts, fire ants don’t get any longer than a quarter inch or so. Everything is bigger in Texas!
An inch-long ant? Man, even a half-inch long ant would be amazing. Fire ants are not very large at all, so I seriously doubt they are fire ants. Besides, you know you’ve been bitten by a fire ant because of the pustule that all fire ant bites produce.
At an inch in lengh, I’m wondering too if they are actually wasps. I’m anxious to see the pictures.
I don’t think crazy ants have hit NTX yet, and besides, like fire ants, they don’t get anywhere near an inch, or even a half-inch, in length.
PS - I’m not an ant expert - just been fighting ants, including fire ants, since I bought my house four years ago. So that makes me an amateur expert, I guess?
My first thought was harvester ants, which are pretty big ants. The soldiers (the ones with the big heads–all ant species have big-headed soldiers, not just fire ants) are especially large, perhaps even an inch in length. The workers have smaller heads but aren’t quite as large in overall size.
The yellow stripe seems a bit unusual for harvester ants–they’re usually all red, sometimes with a lighter red abdomen (just to be clear–the rear segment of the ant’s body). Maybe some of the species in TX have yellowish abdomens? (I base my observations on harvester ants from my hometown in Florida)
And harvester ants both bite and sting, making encounters with them particularly painful.
Far as I can tell only thing that gets that big and will be red in the U.S. are various species of red carpenter ants. They don’t sting per se, but they bite pretty damn good and can spray formic acid.
ETA: I forgot about the Harvester ants. That seems even more likely.
I’m not so sure. I’ve looked at several pages of Google Images under both “cow killer” and “velvet ant” (the other common name), and none of them have the color scheme described in the OP. Also, most cow killers/velvet ants have rather obvious fuzz, and I’d be very surprised if that weren’t noticed and mentioned.
I didn’t think Baggins111 had it, because the picture on the linked article has that “fuzz” on the critter, I haven’t noticed any such fuzz on mine. (On examining the picture above, though, I can convince myself I see some fuzz on the abdomen. The quality makes it hard to tell.)
However, upon further research I found this velvet ant which seems pretty close. (Actually, last night when I was looking around I am sure I found an even better velvet ant match than this, but for some reason I can’t find it again this morning.)
Well, I guess I was also impatient when looking through Google Images the first time.
Going through more of them, I found this. Looks pretty darn close to me. Came from this page; and here’s a page showing some of the variety of velvet ants. The size of the solo pictured critter is 8mm, rather smaller than OP description, but the range mentioned for velvet ants as a group (6-30 mm) is consistent with the 1/2-1" observation.
So that makes me an amateur expert, I guess? 
