It’s here again: that yearly hot spell that sprouts fat,
juicy arachnids. By that, I mean that if an evening walk takes you underneath
some trees, spiderwebs will catch your face, your hair, and any bare skin on
your arms and legs. I love twilight walks in late summer, but spiderwebs oog me
out. I’m too easily convinced that any sticky strand I graze has a spider attached
to it. And that it must be a poisonous one that will find its way into my shoe, under my
shirt, on my neck, ready to exact revenge because I have ruined its creation. I
remain certain of this even though it has never happened. And I am sure it has
never happened because my spastic efforts at de-webbing myself, though mildly
embarrassing, are highly effective. Maniacally wiping my face, jumping, shaking
my arms, stomping my feet, and the occasional involuntary shriek: all this keeps me unbitten and alive.
It is too bad I can’t just chill when it comes to spiders. If
I’d just allow them, they’d cull the flying critters and other creepy-crawlies
that invade our abode from time to time.
Except for wingless ants. Spiders suck at catching indoor ants. And
ants are the other tiny sneaky threat of the muggy hot summertime. (Or
autumntime, as it were. Where I live fall is often summer).
Ants are even more insidious than spiders. Why? Precisely
because they do not evoke fear and trembling. They are typically small and
unnoticeable. They build underground
colonies rather than webs. They are not poisonous (at least not in this part of
the world). When you see one, you don’t go into a conniption fit, worrying that
it might end up under your bedcovers in the middle of the night, ready to exact
venomous revenge. One little ant might actually inspire curiously friendly feelings.
I mean, the poor little bambino’s got a really long way to walk if he hopes to
make it from one end of the kitchen floor to the other. And then things will
get tougher once he runs into the shag carpet. All that work just to take that
bread crumb or sesame seed hull back to the colony. What a trooper. Of course I’m not going to smash you. You’re just
selflessly and tirelessly and instinctively serving your community. Keep on
truckin, little bugger.
That’s how it starts. Eventually a couple of others show up
– “scouts” they’re called – perusing the environs for nutritional
opportunities. If you even manage to
notice them, you’re likely to let them go. Just a couple of ants, that’s all it
is. Meek little communitarian creatures.
This is what makes them such effective invaders. This
summer, for several weeks, I’ve been seeing just a couple of ants here and
there. They don’t seem to be that interested in food. It’s water that
they’re after – they’re cruising the bathroom sinks. Aw, I know, I silently say when I see them. It’s hot outside. All God’s creatures need water. Go right ahead, l'il thirsty suckers.
And then one day, suddenly, several single-file streaks of
God’s creatures are clambering down the bathroom walls -- and up the doorway
next to the coffee pot, newly interested in the sugar bowl and the dirty
dishes. It’s no longer just polite sipping from the bathroom sink. If I don’t do
something soon, they’ll be all over the pantry, operating very effectively as
one big collective overmind. It’s happened before. Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, we got ants.
Windex works as a
quick temporary measure. The spray kills them instantly, and you can just wipe
them up. (If you don’t wipe them up right away, you will eventually have to
endure the sight of fresh ants coming in to retrieve the dead Windexed
ants. I know it’s ridiculous, but that kind of gets to me. I start to wonder:
criminey, are they taking them back to the colony for burial? Are they having
little ant funerals? My husband
reassures me that they are simply recycling the dead bodies. But still, I
think: damn, I’m creating all this extra work for the poor little sons-a-bitches).
Online, I’ve found other relatively non-toxic suggestions for
getting rid of ants: an aardvark, Listerine, borax powder, nutrasweet (ants
allegedly mistake it for sugar, eat it, and starve to death), and a Cinnabon
thrown in your next-door-neighbor’s yard.
But there comes a point when you have to resort to harder
stuff. This year we broke down and bought these small liquid ant baits that
contain a borax solution of such strength and concentration that any unused
portions are to be disposed of at a poison control center. The ants are highly
attracted to the liquid and will take it back to their base, where the toxin
allegedly destroys the entire colony.
So we set out a few of these baits in our bathrooms. I
figured that it would take a few hours, perhaps a day, for the ants to notice
the bait. That had been my experience with previous ant traps – those little
miniature motel-like contraptions where ants “check in, but never leave.” But that
wasn’t the story for this new stuff. Within five minutes, veritable rivers of
ants were rushing around the baits, climbing up inside, swimming in the
terrible nectar, drinking it up, going bat-out-of-hell crazy over this stuff.
Borax? Pah! This was ant meth.
For hours, the ants kept coming. I watched with disquieted
fascination – how fast they were, how hungry they were for this stuff! Were
they really taking this contraband back to their colony? As more ants kept
arriving, I came to the disturbing conclusion that the bait was actually
bringing the colony into the bathroom! Or …. was the colony much larger than I
thought it was? Were we dealing with some kind of supercolony, with these
feeding-frenzy ants representing just the tip of an iceberg...?
I have heard that there are mega-colonies of Argentine ants the size of counties, states, and asteroids. Good lord, I started to wonder
– had we become the unwitting perpetrators of an ant genocide?
Soon, some ants started dying inside the bait containers,
while others seemed to be staggering around drunkenly, unwilling or unable to
leave the premises. Oh ants, damnit. I
hope it was a good way to go. A really grand last dance. Eventually, most of the
ants disappeared. But dozens of dead ants are now peppering the bathroom floor.
And none of their compadres are coming to retrieve their bodies.
However, a few spiders have taken over the most
heavily-ant-infested bathroom, which I have kept closed for several days. They
have spun corner webs and have somehow managed to catch a lot of ants – I’m
assuming that some grandly intoxicated ants keeled over and literally toppled into the
webs.
So now things have come full circle, haven’t they? Because the spiders are no longer just dangling webs down from the trees that line
our twilight walks. They are also spinning webs in the corners of our genocidal
ant-meth bathroom. Alas: It's the vengeance of the creepy-crawly world.
