The title would be: To Bug or Not to Bug
I’m talking insects, of course,
and ants specifically. We’ve been
invaded by the mini-monsters—they’re crawling up from where the basement window
wells meet the driveway, they’re crawling in from where the deck meets the
house. I pick them off the ceiling and
hallway walls. I vacuum them off the
kitchen floor. If I find one on the
table or in a cupboard or on the counter I’m going to freak out in a banshee
sort of way.
Let’s not even go toward the
possibility that one might crawl on me in the night.
I didn’t know this until
recently, but ants are like the borg. They interact as a communal being,
communicating a main idea to each other until everybody starts going in the
same direction. And apparently, each ant
hill is like a fingerprint, as I’ve been told by someone who studies ants for a
living. You could transplant one colony
of ants into an abandoned ant hill and pretty soon the abandoned hill would be
transformed into whatever the new host group of ants left behind. Kudos to anyone following that idea.
Have you ever wondered why
those little tiny ants boil up from between the cracks in sidewalks or
driveways or parking lots? Turf
war. One group of amazons (the females
do all the fighting, of course) attacks another group of amazons and they
basically bite, sting and poison each other to death. There’s a bit of leg-ripping and decapitation. There are mortal wounds.
That part of ant-drama is not
my problem, though. I’m just concerned
with keeping them from finding food in my seventy-year-old house. And it’s weird, but some years they show up
and some years they don’t. Maybe it’s a
cicada kind of thing . . . .
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