Showing posts with label grease ants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grease ants. Show all posts

Monday, August 13, 2007

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.
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