Cold weather and rain teamed up to drive all the ants in our neighborhood to our house for a visit. Now we’re used to the occasional single column of ants seeking whatever it is that ants seek. And when that column looks more like a four-lane freeway, that doesn’t really bother us as we simply move around the ant stakes to block their free flow. But Thursday evening we were both blown away when Carolyn opened the door between the garage and the laundry room and turned on the garage lights. “Arnold, I think we have a swarm of ants,” she said relatively calmly. The green welcome mat just outside the door could not be seen because of the carpet of moving ants. There were rivers and streams of ants leading from (to?) that welcome mat and out the garage car doors and side door. Some rivers were 2 or 3 inches wide, others nine inches in some places. It was the most incredible thing I had ever seen. They didn’t seem to be swarming inside, just throughout the garage on the garage floor.
Fortunately, we had just purchased a new can of ant spray so I began the task of subduing the enemy even as they were starting to crawl on my shoes and over my legs. The ant rivers were the easiest to attack and were soon simply non-moving black ribbons on the garage floor. The areas against the walls behind the freezer and other stored materials were more difficult. The low-lying fumes of the spray were beginning to reach those areas that I hadn’t sprayed yet such as underneath the cars and some of the boxes. The spray can fizzled out just as I spied one more stream of ants trying to follow the pipes from the water heater.
It was late at night and raining heavily so we weren’t in the mood to go shopping for more ant spray. But when we found a small column of ants in the guest bathroom I looked through the supplies in the laundry room to find another can there. The threat appeared to have been conquered. We were just glad that the species of ant was little sugar ants rather than red warrior ants.
When I got home from work the next day, there was evidence that Carolyn had found another column of ants in the kitchen around the stove area. And again they were handled quickly. At least they didn’t seem to be getting into our food anywhere. We looked in all our cupboards and pantry. But this morning when we looked into the cereal cupboard, we saw hundreds of ants scouting out the cold cereal. Nothing like the first invasion, of course, but still ants were on and in all the cereal boxes. Where they hadn’t actually gotten into the cereal we were able to wipe or spray them off. The contaminated ones we simply threw away. There were only one or two.
Now we’re wondering where the next attack will be. And I can’t get the Pink Panther song out of my head. You know:
Dead ant,
dead ant,
Dead ant, dead ant, dead ant, dead ant……
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