WATER AND WARMTH
What keeps a lawn here attractive to fire ants
Irrigation, mostly. Fire ants want soil that is warm and holds a little moisture, and a watered lawn supplies both through a Texas summer that would otherwise drive colonies deep and quiet. That is why the newer irrigated subdivisions spreading along TX-114 and I-35W can look busier than unwatered ground a short way off.
The other half is how recently the ground was turned over. Roanoke's historic core around Oak Street sits on soil that settled generations ago and carries an established ant community, so mounds there are occasional and show up in the sunniest, most disturbed spots. On the new side of town no such community is left, and fire ants move in ahead of everything else.
PRICING IN ROANOKE
The bait is included; here is what the plan runs
Fire ant treatment is not sold by itself, so there is no figure to quote for it alone. It is folded into Home Defender at $30 to $54 a month and into Complete Home & Lawn Defense at $40 to $73.50, both priced by the square footage of the house. Newer builds in town usually land at 3,000 to 4,500 square feet, which is $38 to $46 on the first of those.
Smaller houses in the older core sit more often in the $30 to $38 range, and the largest builds reach $46 to $54, with anything past 6,000 square feet quoted on sight. Copper mesh sealing of the weep holes comes with both plans as well, which is worth checking against any other quote you are holding.
Historic-core houses
$30–$38/mo
Home Defender up to 3,000 sq ft
3,000 to 4,500 sq ft
$38–$46/mo
The newer corridor builds
4,500 to 6,000 sq ft
$46–$54/mo
The largest homes in town
Whole-yard plan
$40–$73.50/mo
Complete Home & Lawn Defense, full range
Every number on this page comes from our published price list. Roanoke homes get the same table as everyone else; the instant quote reads your square footage and lot size and hands you your own line.
WHAT TO EXPECT
Three things that stay true after we treat
Greenbelt and creek boundaries keep feeding you. Untreated rough ground behind a fence produces colonies indefinitely, so a Roanoke lot backing a greenbelt sees more new mounds than one surrounded on all sides by other lawns. That is a maintenance reality rather than a failure of the product.
The first three weeks will look as though nothing is happening. Bait travels from forager to queen and the colony dies from within, which takes two to three weeks and leaves the mounds looking perfectly normal meanwhile. Watching them closely in week one is a good way to talk yourself into a drench that undoes the work.
And ants indoors are a separate line of work. Ants crossing a kitchen floor are usually a different species that found a gap in the structure, and the answer is the perimeter treatment, the dusted and sealed weep holes and, if it comes to that, the interior treatment the plan includes.
TWO PLANS COMPARED
Does the upgrade buy you anything against fire ants?
Not a thing. The broadcast bait on Complete Home & Lawn Defense is the same product, at the same rate, over the same complete lawn as on Home Defender, so nobody in Roanoke should be paying the difference in the belief that it buys better ant control.
What the upgrade genuinely buys is turf treatment: chinch bugs in St. Augustine, grubs and armyworms in Bermuda, and the chiggers that come off a greenbelt boundary. If your lawn has any of those, it is worth the money on its own terms. If it does not, we will point you at the cheaper plan.
THE FIRST STOP
How the opening Roanoke visit is spent
Sun, sprinklers and soil age
We look at which parts of the lawn take full sun, where the irrigation actually reaches, and how long ago the ground was worked, because between them those three explain nearly every mound on a property.
The whole lawn, in one pass
Bait is broadcast across all of the turf at a rate that disappears into it, because the colonies you have not found outnumber the ones you have. It is booked for a dry stretch of roughly 24 hours and the date moves if the forecast turns.
Foundation, eaves and weep holes
The rest of the visit is structural: a treated band at the foundation, the eaves, Delta Dust through the weep holes and copper mesh packed in to seal them for good. That permanent sealing is part of the plan rather than an upsell at the door.
