In Hawaii’s ongoing battle against little fire ants, teamwork is key.
In Hawaii’s ongoing battle against little fire ants, teamwork is key.
This weekend, the Big Island Invasive Species Committee kicks off a training program that will help entire neighborhoods learn how to apply pesticide to their properties. And this summer, Hawaii County is expected to launch a voucher program that will amplify the efforts of organizations such as BIISC and the Hilo-based Hawaii Ant Lab.
The County Council is set to appropriate funding for the program next week. The $96,589 in grant money comes from the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife.
Once implemented, the voucher program will be administered in part by the Hawaii County Economic Opportunity Council.
“We’re still hashing out a lot of the details,” said Glenn Sako, agriculture specialist for Hawaii County Research and Development. He said he did not expect the program to be established for another three months.
The voucher program, that will help residents obtain pesticide, will dovetail with the training work being done by BIISC and the Hawaii Ant Lab.
Only people who attended training through either of the two organizations will be eligible for a county voucher, said BIISC communications director Franny Kinslow Brewer.
“There’s a lot of regulations, and there’s a limited amount of funding, and you don’t want to just be like, ‘Hey, free pesticides,’” Brewer said. “It’s not a good way to run any kind of program.”
The BIISC program that starts this week focuses on teaching the most effective ways to use pesticide so ants do not return.
Its main goal, however, is to encourage neighborhoods to work together to fight little fire ants.
“It’s a much more effective treatment if you come together and treat large areas,” Brewer said. “Our goal is to help kick off a neighborhood plan that should take about a year (to complete).”
The county program will be another incentive for groups to keep moving forward with treatment, she said.
Scattered treatments for little fire ants are one of the major problems with fighting the spread of the insect, said state Rep. Richard Onishi, D-Hilo, Keaau, Kurtistown, Volcano. If a neighborhood doesn’t coordinate efforts, the ants will move on to another property and return to their source later.
Onishi proposed creating a similar coupon program during the past two state legislative sessions, but the bills did made it past conferencing. Those measures would have worked with the state Department of Agriculture, using its GIS mapping system to track infestation sites on a neighborhood scale.
Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
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For more information about neighborhood training sessions, contact the Big Island Invasive Species Committee at biisc@hawaii.edu.
Hawaii Ant Lab training sessions are hosted monthly. For more information or to book a training session, visit littlefireants.com.