They’re b-a-a-a-a-c-k!
The Ondts have begun their summer campaign, and we have engaged the first battle of the season. A Myrmidon battalion was spotted this afternoon, undertaking an attack on the refrigerator. It appeared they were trying to roll it out the back door.
Ant intelligence agents are telepathic. How else to explain their unerring knowledge of the human exhaustion level? Invariably, they launch their raids when the enemy is quivering on the edge of nervous collapse.
O.K., O.K. I admit it: I haven’t cleaned the kitchen floor in a week, and yeah, something that I don’t clearly remember rolled under the fridge a week or so ago, and no, I’m just not strong enough to move the refrigerator, and so yes, it was inevitable that eventually the ant trash removal brigade would show up sooner or later. But really. They could have picked a day that didn’t begin at 5:30 a.m. with backwashing the clogged pool filter followed by the surprise 6:15 appearance of Gerardo’s non-English-speaking palm tree dude followed by MORE pool-cleaning followed by a very busy day of racing around the city followed by a wrestling match with Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner in 110-degree heat. They know. They do know.
I laid waste to legions of the lady warriors, though. Home-made glass & tile cleaner (rubbing alcohol + water + ammonia) does them in when it’s sprayed directly over their little bodies. Must’ve killed 80 or 100 of them. Experience suggests, however, that for every ant that croaks over, two ants are waiting to take her place.
Mopped up the field of battle with a microfiber rag on a swiffer mop. Vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed, in hopes of picking up whatever flecks of food are on the floor. Then dust-mopped again. Then mopped with a hot solution of Simple Green.
This strategy seemed to beat them back.
Ah, but the night is young. Puny human efforts to vanquish the armies of the night, as we know, little avail us. I expect they’re still out there. Waiting.
Image: Ant carrying an aphid. Luisifer. vlastní fotografie. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
We had ants in the house last weekend for the first time in a couple of years. Located the Amdro and gave them a few sprinkles and they were gone within 12 hours. I don’t know how toxic this stuff is, and I generally try to play nice with nature but ants are one critter I’ve battled with no luck and now I just haul out the Amdro. The other critter we fought for months, until you could hear them in the ceiling eating the rafters was mice… didn’t want to use poison for fear the dogs or cats would eat the dead bodies, but finally resorted to poisoning the little things and thankfully they have never come in the house again. Good luck with your battle! 🙂
@ Mrs. Accountability: There’s a type of rat trap that the critters can go into but can’t get out. They’re a little pricey, though. Did you try ordinary mouse traps? I think they get wise to those things, though, after they see a few of their pals get whacked.
I see that Amdro makes a bait. That’s the best way to deal with ants: the workers think it’s food, which they feed to the queen. Once she’s gone, the hive can’t survive very long.
For some reason, the ondts suddenly stood down from their attack. I got bit in the wee hours of Sunday morning when I went out to peer through the front window after some idiot set off a bunch of big firecrackers and then roared by with his boombox blaring. Drowned a few more of them in DIY glass cleaner. At dawn when I could safely go outside, I got some DE out of the storage shed and sprinkled it across the threshold where they were entering.
Interestingly, they were able to walk across the stuff, but they really don’t like it. After a few hours, they gave up.
Also interestingly — get this! — they seem to have retrieved the bodies of their fallen comrades. There’s not a single ant corpse on the kitchen or living-room floor! Don’t know whether they cannibalize each other or whether they simply carry off their dead. Very strange.
DE has the same effect on crawling insects as boric acid: it slices into the creature’s exoskeleton, so that in short order she dehydrates. As with bait, they will carry the stuff back into the hive: when it gets on them they’re still ambulatory, and so it’s all over them when they go home. When they go to the queen to tend her, they get the DE or boric acid on her, and eventually that will do her in.