Effectiveness of Hemp Oil and Orange Citric Oil as Fire Ant (Solenopsis geminata) Repellent

More and more people are looking for solutions to their pest problems outside of the mainstream pesticides and pest repellents found in stores and are turning toward “home-remedies” such as essential oils. However, there is limited research about the effectiveness of certain essential oils on repelling and killing arthropods. This experiment covered the use of hemp oil and orange citric oil as possible repellants for fire ants (Solenopsis geminate) common to the Brazos Valley of Texas. Collection of ants was done from an ant mound next to the Texas A&M entomological building and running of the experiment was done inside the building. Petri dishes were used to contain the experiment and the number of times the ants touched the substance was counted and compared against the others. The water control had the height touch count and its average was statistically different (p value= 0.00028805) than the substances tested. Orange citric oil had consistent results among its three trials and there was a statistical difference between it and the control tests. Hemp oil was not as consistent in its results. Although two of the trials had counts very close to each other, the third trial had more than double the counts than the other trials. These results show that orange citric oil was a very effective repellant to Solenopsis geminata compared to the water control. Hemp oil shows promise as a repellent but a larger experiment size would need to be used in order to determine the consistency of its effectiveness. Possible next steps in this line of research include expanding on hemp oil’s effectiveness, determining if the ability of an oil to aerosolize changes its effectiveness, and if other essential oils are effective as repellents against Solenopsis geminate