Over the years I’ve been increasingly tolerant of some insects in my environment – or sharing our environment, to be exact. An attempt will always be made to relocate a spider, a beetle or a bee from the house. Outdoors, I enjoy the Blue-winged Wasps bouncing around the hostas and the carpenter bees hovering too close with their phony bravado that makes me smile.

However, there are a few I will not abide and have no guilt about eliminating. Mosquitos, nope! Horseflies inside the window – if they don’t leave immediately when I open the screen, their time is numbered. Yellow Jackets are aggressive assholes and will always be discouraged. If they don’t get the message that it is time to go, they will be sprayed. Scutigera (those freaky, super-fast house centipedes) also are a no, partially because they are impossible to catch intact to move out of the room. If a Scutigera decides to leave the basement and come up onto any other floor, it’s dust. I’m just not going to share my spaces with them. We’ve never had a roach here, but if there was I think I would seriously consider moving out.

Then there are the ants, which always create a bit of moral dilemma for me. The social structure of the ant colony and their collective intelligence is fascinating. It is the females who go out foraging for food for the rest of the colony, arriving each spring to my kitchen – usually a few here and there, never having been much of a problem. They are such fastidious, hard workers! So when the first few (the large black variety) showed up a few weeks ago – one was found in the teapot, another couple on the countertop – I wasn’t too worried about it. As a matter of fact – this might seem kind of crazy to some – I attempted to scoop them onto a piece of paper and usher them out the back door. Having done this a few times, suddenly with greater and greater frequency, I will share that ants definitely do not enjoy being relocated. You upset their purpose when trying to pick them up, causing them to frantically wave their legs and antennae around, zig-zag and actually leap into the air. They pretty much flip out. I supposed it was some misguided benevolence on my part to try relocating them. As their numbers increased I conceded this was folly….as a matter of fact I even said aloud to myself, “Seriously??? What are you doing?”

Because soon they were everywhere. On my car, on the back porch. On the countertops, across the floors, in the cabinets, wedging their bodies into the crevice of the cap on a jar of honey, looking for crumbs of cereal. (As an aside, I want to mention they did not touch my stash of chocolate at all, which is both confusing and a relief. A little research revealed that despite the sugar content, some ant species just do not like chocolate, and also that the caffeine it contains can be harmful to them. These must be the anti-chocolate variety). I started putting anything sweet or crumbly into plastic bags and jars. But that was not enough, as their scouts began checking out the upstairs bathroom and marching across the hallway floor.

This invasion happened rather quickly; we had so much rain this past month that I’m guessing they had decided to find higher ground along with the free food source. The S.O. just started stepping on them and leaving them there on the floor. I assume he thought the dog might eat them (the dog did not) or that I would clean them up (I did), or I don’t know what he thought (most likely he did not think). It was rather disgusting (and disrespectful, really) but that’s another story.

For any natural save-the-ant types out there, I can tell you what I tried first and what doesn’t work. There was no kumbaya with the ants happening here. They remained unfazed by spraying deterrents like peppermint oil or vinegar around the perimeters of the room, the countertops, or along their ant trails. I finally broke down and bought some commercial ant traps, which did nothing – perhaps it was not the type of bait which attracts this specific ant variety. So finally I made my own.

Then I spread it on cotton balls and little squares of paper towel and placed them on the kitchen countertop, a windowsill, and by the back door along the base of the house where I had seen an ant trail. They were very attracted to it – sometimes there was a pile of them feasting on each of my little bait stations. It took a couple of days, but between day two and three, all the ants were gone. The Feelings: Quite Impressed, A Little Bit Elated, and Somewhat Guilty.

After another few days of rain, I spotted only one foolish scout who looked a bit confused as it waved its arms around. So far we have success.

Some blessed breaks in the weather afforded the opportunity to do some gardening. While elbows deep into the weeds, ants would occasionally run across my arms, but we didn’t really bother each other. However, yesterday as I was pulling weeds out from between the cracks in the bluestone by the front steps, the clumps of roots must have been the cover for a massive nest. Soon thousands (yes, thousands) of disturbed ants began pouring out of the spaces vacated by the vegetation. These were a different variety, as they were the little tiny ones.

This was not an ant-bait and wait situation, so I flushed out the nest with water. I have to say I felt both horrible and mesmerized watching those tiny ants doing an emergency evacuation, as they carried out and tried to save white pupae as large as themselves.

After the flood, the walkway was littered with specks of dead ants and pupae, scattered about like the remnants of a miniature tsunami. If you are of the theory that Everything is Connected, which to some degree I am, you can imagine this caused another pang of momentary guilt for me. But then something else happened.

The House Sparrows descended on the path, taking dust baths where the sandy soil had been disturbed from pulling the weeds.

Next they began to check out the open spaces in the walkway.

And then began to pick up and eat the dead ants. Suddenly I felt a whole lot better about it.

Yeah, that was kind of cool.

~*~