antz
HOLEE FUCK. this is not happening.
so, there's this problem that we're having in this apartment. and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with that bastard charles. nor does it have to do with tommy and his propensity to have me tivo programs about "xbox: the next generation TOTALLY REVEALED [hosted by elijah wood and with a special performance by the killers]". nor, surprisingly, does it have to do with me and the fact that i just drank a half a bottle of wine. (this is what i do when i'm alone. i drink wine, check my bloglines subscription like six times a minute [why don't you people update more?!] and watch either a) under the tuscan sun b) sense & sensibility c) hours 2-4 of pride & prejudice the a&e version. next year is gonna be GREAT.)
no, the problem is much larger, and, funnily, at the same time much smaller. it is the ants. the tiny, fucking ants.
we started getting them about a month ago - they marched under the door in a small and sparse line, making their way from our landing to the bar between the kitchen and living room. at first i thought they were kinda cute. little tiny bugs! i mean, there weren't too many of them, ants don't bite you (well, these little black ones) or gauge your eyeballs out or nest in your hair or anything. plus, i thought, a few ant hotels would take care of the issue. no problemo! off to the giant to buy a few ant hotels and set them up in strategic positions along the walls. of course i felt much remorse at poisoning god's creatures, but dude - these are fucking insects. they're just lucky i'm not stabbing them with toothpicks and laughing.
for a couple weeks nothing happened - the ants neither increased or decreased but just kept on their steady march along our blonde bamboo floors. just as i began to be frustrated, i whisked myself off to fabulous italy, where there is gelato and stone villas and creepy monks, but no ants. and thus i forgot.
but by the time we got back, the problem seemed to have gotten worse. charles had been cleaning a lot while we were gone, and even his super magical cleaning abilities couldn't get rid of the little suckers. worse, they started to have an inclination for our dishwasher and kitchen counters. if we so much left a crumb of food or swipe of oil anywhere, they were on it. even worse, i started, like...hallucinating. ants, suddenly, were everywhere. i'd feel a slight breeze on my arm and freak out, thinking ants were crawling on it. out of the corner of my eye i'd see a slight movement and whip around to whack my hand down on the offending ant, only to find out nothing was actually there. it's been a little worrying. and a little stressful. i'm running the dishwasher at least once a day; the kitchen is getting mopped and wiped down all the time; i yell at tommy if he so much as thinks about leaving out the cutting board.
WORST OF ALL, i am constantly thinking about, like, ant military strategy. i worry that i'm cleaning too much and killing too many ants so that the offending suckers can't get back to their terrible little nest and inform their wiggly brethren that the kitchen counters are being sponged six times a night by some crazy yelling lady. i think about letting them swarm around a while on clean surfaces so that they realize there ain't nothing there and leave me the hell alone. i mean, can it get any worse than thinking about reverse psychology on ants? i think not.
but oh (and you'll never believe this), it just got worse. a lot worse. here i am, with aforementioned wine and terrible diane lane movie, enjoying the night alone. also with me is unaforementioned piece of lemon pound cake, which i just baked my little ass off to make last night. yummy, thick, lemony lemon pound cake. so good. i'm over on the couch, SEVERAL FEET away from the kitchen, in an area where there has never been an ant sighting. and you'll never guess what. go on, guess. yeah. no. a FUCKING ANT CRAWLED OUT OF NOWHERE ON TO MY PRECIOUS LEMON CAKE.
blogosphere, i'm writing this bitter entry because i need help. i'm pretty sure it is not this healthy to feel so much anger towards, well, anything, but especially bugs. it is also not healthy to be cleaning the kitchen twice a day and imagining ants crawling all over you. i'm about to check myself into a mental health clinic in south africa. please help me. give me your awesome, your cheap, your ant-murdering techniques. because i just saw an ant crawl across my laptop, and i'm about to go postal.
Comments
Talk to your landlord. A good one will call an exterminator. That is really the only good solution short of following the ants back to their hive and somehow destroying it (which I have never been able to do because they tend to go through walls and behind baseboards). I'm sorry to say that killing a few ants here and there is nearly useless. If they are carpenter ants (smaller black ones), then it is a very serious problem for the building.
My parents had termite, ant, and other bug issues in central Florida (i.e., the land of lightning and bugs). An exterminator comes every few years and puts some kind of plugs in the concrete and that solved our problems completely. You wouldn't believe how many dead bugs immediately turned up. They don't seem to do anything about gigantic spiders and lizards though.
What you need is some boric acid. Mix it up with some sugar and water (or jelly, or whatever) and swab it around the affected areas. The trick is to make it concentrated enough such that they'll take it back home and poison the queen, but not so strong that they die en route.
The best part is that boric acid is free if you work in a chemistry lab. Which, upon reflection, most people do not.
yeah, i emailed my landlord yesterday since i was thinking it was getting out of control. he's a nice guy, so hopefully he'll get an exterminator.
boric acid *is* cheap and available at CVS, though. How strong a solution, jeff? I'm hoping for an answer expressed in molarity, but it would probably be better if it wasn't.
Those little ants are pretty easy. First thing, you have to find what they are attracted to. usually this will be some sugary thing that's slightly leaking or open or something. Clean out all your cabinest and inspect them. 9 times out of 10, you'll find them all over some bottle of something.
Once you've done that, buy Raid and spray everywhere they've been walking and along the floorboards in the kitchen. You can even douse your empty cabinets with it.
Then, clean up the bodies (gross), wash your dishes/food containers and rebuild. There may be a few stragglers you didn't get, but that should take care of them. A big line of ants means that someone found something and reported back to the hive and now they are on a mission. If you kill any ant you see from there on, it shouldn't happen again (at least until next year).
Boric acid is a little extreme and makes a huge mess and is a real pain in the ass and is mostly for roaches, so I wouldn't do that unless the Raid doesn't work and the landlord is a douchebag about getting an exterminator.
BTW, you think I'm spamming you because of my URL?!?!? WTF is that?!?!
but i'm too lazy to clean out all my cabinets...
i think maybe we accidentally blacklisted a comment of yours during a spam cleanout. i'll check it out and take it off. sorry!
yeah, sorry HaH. We got hit really hard by comment spam while on vacation, and had to clear it out by searching for unfortunately non-specific keywords like "gay" or "poker". probably one of your comments was returned among the hundreds of spam entries, and accidentally got added to the blacklist. looks like catherine took care of it already.
Man, I have an ant problem too, and unfortunately they're after Wreck's dog food. Jeff, do you have an ant-specific solution that my dog won't ingest? If possible, one that involves titration?
Cool. I guess I'll ease up on the v14a5r4 P0k3r P4rt33z stuff. I got my first comment spam yesterday. Fucking annoying. I get a shitload of referrer spam. Does MT have a module for the ticketmaster-style unparseable magic code thingy? That could work.
Anyway, if the ants are in your cabinets, do you really want to eat off of plates those ants have been crawling all over? Maybe I have some OCD, but when I find the ants, I must cleanse all things related to food of their vile presence before I can cook/eat again.
At any rate, you should at least find their honeypot and try the Raid thing. It's worked every time I've had ants (an annual occurence in one apartment I lived in).
they don't seem to be in the cabinets - just on the floor and mostly in the dishwasher. there really aren't swarms of them (yet) but our landlord is going to look into it.
Carpenter ants wouldn't go for food, they're usually looking for water. So I doubt you've got carpenter ants. The solution is finding the nest, not necessarily poisoning your whole house.
As for the immediate problem, I suggest using an old vaccum cleaner to vaccum up the ants rather than killing them on the spot. They'll eventually dehydrate and you won't have that nasty spray everywhere.
I have carpenter bees drilling through my cedar eaves in several spots, and despite all the killings & carnage, the workers keep returning. (fortunately they only drill into the eaves, they're not trying to get in my house. Could you imagine how horrific that would be?) I'm going to have to go all nuclear on their ass. Hate it. Also, it's a pain to plug up all the 1/4" holes they drill.
Maybe I'll post my ordeal on my blog and get all Zunta-like.
Later. --s
Actually, Kriston, I think boric acid is non-toxic to us vertebrates. Much less so than Raid, at least. I still think it's the winning solution.
A quick perusal of the Journal of Economic Entomology tells me that a solution of 25% sugar and 0.5 to 1% boric acid killed 100% of queens in a colony of Aringine ant (the obnoxious kind we have in NorCal) within 14 days*. So tommy, that would work out to a solution of 0.73M sucrose with 0.15M boric acid.
The trick is to put it into small enough vessels that the dog won't or can't get at them.
*Hooper-Bui, Rust. J Econ Entomol. 2000. 93(3):858-64
Seriously, the exterminator. They cut up plastic straws that have some sort of poison inside and place the short straw pieces strategically around the back of your counter, sinks, windowsills, whatever. Then the ants go away. No acid, no cleaning things, no bodies. Only dialing of the phone, which is my favorite way of tackling household chores.
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