Wednesday, May 15, 2013



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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