Dripping burning honey in the vicinity of your house is a terribly bad idea.
When I was about seven years old my brother and cousin tricked me into stepping into a fire ant mound. They then kept me distracted* while the ants covered my legs, eventually biting all at once. The pain was excruciating, and I promise you, they would have had no compunction whatsoever about slowly and painfully eating me alive.
Feeling sorry for fire ants is like feeling sorry for Cthulhu. They only want to you to die. and be yummy.
*They fully deserve to be atomized by molten metal. And so do the ants.
As is disturbing the bees in general, I know. In general, I treat them with respect, as one should all living things, but, damn it, they haven’t learned to share.
They don’t bite, they sting; they inject venom into your body, just like bees and wasps do.
One may argue the morality of extinguishing living beings in a general sense, but I think that an argument based on suffering is misplaced. I think that even if you assume ants are capable of suffering as we are, the effects of pouring molten metal on an ant are completely different from pouring molten metal on a human being. A fire ant’s head is about 1/16" in diameter, and its exoskeleton is perhaps a few thousandths of an inch thick. Because they are so small, the time required for lethal quantities of heat to penetrate into their brain (and eliminate any ability to suffer) is a small fraction of a second. If they do indeed suffer, then they don’t suffer any longer than they would if you stepped on them.
I’m pretty sure fully immersing a human being in molten metal would be an nearly instanteous death, too. Liquid aluminum is about 1200 degrees Fahrenheit - I think flesh and bone is going to pretty much instantly disintegrate at that temperature.
A body would probably explode as the water flashed into steam. Same with the ants I imagine. Like a whole bunch of popcorn as the aluminum courses into the tunnels.
They both bite and sting. I am in a constant war with them, and pouring molten anything into their nests actually brings me joy. Poisons are a lot less trouble, except for that organic issue. So I also use the bait poison.
I hate fire ants more than any other insect, except maybe killer bees.
Oh man I hope so. It always bugged me that the pain and suffering fire ants inflict could never be returned to them in kind.
If they suffer, then good.
If you ever have your small child covered with them, you will understand. If not, and you feel sorry for them, then you just don’t understand. Come to Florida, the lesson will never be forgotten.
Oh yeah, when it floods, like in the middle of a hurricane, at night, the flood waters can contain the entire fire ant nests, rafting, to survive. In your house. At night. Crawling over and stinging everyone and everything they come into contact with.
Kill them. Kill them with fire.
Not really. See Leidenfrost effect, which limits the rate of heat transfer between extremely hot liquids and objects which outgas when heated. Planned demonstrations of this effect involved wetting your body before applying molten metal, so that the free water can provide the necessary vapor blanket - but it seems to me that your bare flesh would happily generate the required gases to produce an insulating blanket that limits heat transfer. Your skin and flesh will still rapidly char and vaporize, but it will take a considerable amount of time before the heat penetrates into your brain and shuts it off - and you’ll be suffering plenty in the meantime.
If you arbitrarily suppose that living tissue in contact with liquid metal is vaporized at 1/4 inch per second, then it would be several seconds before a human being is rendered unconscious. For an ant with a head 1/16" in diameter, their brain would be completely vaporized in just 1/8 of a second, and probably dead well before then.
Of course fire ants bite. The bite itself is painful, but they don’t bite to hurt - the little fuckers do it so they can get a nice grip to sting and sting and sting and keep stinging. Makes it hard to brush them off too.
With molten metal playing at the outer boundary of your body, there’s going to be a temperature gradient ranging from “comfortably cool flesh” in the interior to “insensate carbon compounds” at the surface. Somewhere in between those two extremes there will be a layer within which still-living nerve endings are screaming in agony. As the outer layers of your body vaporize, that gradient will gradually move further and further into the interior of your body - but there would always be a layer that’s generating pain signals.
At least that’s my theory. I assume that even if your skin is gone, your muscles and organs and other interior tissues have nerve endings in them that can produce pain signals. Afterall, isn’t that how we get joint pain, muscle soreness, chest pain, stomach cramps, “I’ve been shot/stabbed” pain, and so on? So it seems that every part of your body, from the skin down to the chewy center, is capable of hurting.