Ants! Hope at Last!

It was a time for desperate measures. Our kitchen had been overrun by grease ants.

Grease ants: so small, they can march through crevasses to narrow for ordinary pests.

Grease ants: so cunning, when encountering a patch of grease laced with ant poison, they eat the grease but leave the poison.

Until this weekend, the only means of slowing them down was the application of vinegar spray. And even that was only a temporary measure. They kept coming back.

Always, they kept coming back!

Then, my eldest daughter, after exhaustive research, came up with a new instrumentality through which this household might emerge victorious against the ants!

She combined

• Talcum powder
• Instant coffee
• Ground cinnamon
• Chili powder

- and applied the mixture to to the beachhead which the grease ants had established, and also applied the mixture at strategic points along their supply lines.

Success! Today, I can confidently say that the ants have been defeated, or at least repelled.

My daughter told of one ant she had observed. The creature advanced along a supply line until it encountered a grain of the noxious compound. Retreating, it adjusted its course and tried again, only to be thwarted once more. Again and again it tried, and failed, to circumvent the instrumentality of our new offensive.

I, myself, witnessed an ant: no doubt one of the last of the horde; running from one to another of its fallen comrades. In most cases, the sad creature approached closely enough to be within, I should think, antenna-reach before quickly turning aside to approach another corpse. Sometimes, perhaps because the evidence of destruction was so obvious, the lone survivor turned away while still at a distance.

Although I could, of course, hear nothing, I imagined the lone survivor calling out as it approached each fallen ant, "Abigail?" "Adelynn?" "No! Not Ahdena!" "Aldalee?" "Oh, no: They got Althea!" "Ambret?" "Azilda?" And so on, across the grim landscape.

It may seen cold, even heartless, but I feel but only a small pang of pity for the creatures who invaded our domain.

Ants! It's a Two-Front War Now!

Somehow, the ants found their way into our general foods storage depot. They've occupied a box of crackers, and probably have targeted other units as well.

A valiant effort at cutting off their supply lines on the southern front was partially successful, but I fear that this is only a temporary reprieve.

Chemical warfare is still the backbone of my wife's strategy against the ants. Determining that our stock of basil leaf has lost its potency, she is bringing fresh material into action.

Our Research and Development unit deployed an innovative device, consisting of glue and several types of grease. The ants formed a perimeter around the device, but otherwise ignored it.

"Those are smart ants," my wife observed.

Additional reports will follow, as circumstances warrant.

Ants! Nothing Stops Them!

Sometimes I feel like I'm in some fifties science-fiction B movie. Relentless hords of creatures have invaded. Conventional weapons are useless. (Sort of like Them! (1954), except that this enemy doesn't provide the big, slow-moving targets that the Hollywood ants did.)

Sure, saturation-bombing of an area with vinegar kills some of them, but a seemingly endless stream of replacements keeps marching in.

Those tiny ants are still in the kitchen.

Putting a plate into the washer last night, I saw dozens fall onto the inside of the washer's door when I tipped the plate. We've cleaned what we can, but a family of six needs to eat a few times a day, and that isn't an entirely smear-free process on the kitchen counter.

I took a picture of some of the things, plus a few crumbs, I think, earlier today. My wife may not appreciate that. The big oval thing on the right is a spoon. As I said before, those ants are tiny.

I made a post yesterday about them, and there really hasn't been that much change in our status.

The ants still have numbers and single-minded purpose on their side. They seem to have nothing to do but raid our kitchen. We, on the other hand, are distracted by day-to-day duties, but have superior intelligence on our side.

My wife still hasn't formulated a winning attack strategy.

Gingerly treading the narrow way between the twin threats of myrmecophobia and myrmecophilia, I'll continue to report as there are fresh developments.

Ants!

We've got ants this summer, again.

Little ones, tiny, smaller-than-a-breadcrumb things that just keep coming!

One of my kids reports that my wife, having cleared out the space under the kitchen sink, was sitting in front of the open door, with a flashlight, staring into the open space.

"Making battle plans against the ants?" she asked.

"Oh, yeah!" was the reply.