Thursday, January 11, 2007

Ant invasion

As the weather is getting irritatingly hotter, my house is getting invaded by ants from all angles.
They crawl in from the roof, they come in through the doors and windows, they invade the car, they come through the pipes, they build nests in my drawers, they crawl over the laundry...they are just EVERYWHERE.

Black ants that are just annoying and crawl at the speed of light, red ants that bite like crazy and that look for sweets, tiny red ants that just give you the creeps...you can find them all in my house. My parents have found that they can kill the ants by chalking up the places where the ants are likely to show up, so having lines and lines of chalk running up, down and along the walls is quite ordinary at home.

Sometimes though, when the ants are actively attacking something, be it some crumbs or food left on the table, or just a piece of cloth, it's better to use a spray that will kill them instantly! So sometimes you'd find my dad armed with a spray, killing the ants with poison spray in very strategic places. The thing is, however, that the ants might retaliate stronger, where you have once killed hundreds of ants, you come back 1 hr later to find thousands of them milling around the dead bodies of their contemporaries. I've just read an article that suggests it is best to kill the ants with a poison that they will bring back to their nest, therefore killing the whole nest in one go. I need to find such a poison so that my dad could retire from his role as the ant-fighter at home.

In CA, ants seldom come into the house. You could leave a chocolate on the table and find it weeks later at the same spot, without an ant around (you might not want to eat it though!). A good thing about Canada also is that food don't go stale as quickly as it does here. A bag of chips, left opened for a week, would still taste the same and as crisp as ever. Here, I've found bags of chips still sealed that have gone stale before the expiry date. So in a quest to keep away ants and to keep food from getting stale as much as possible, I've had to get back into the habit of using airtight containers and not leaving crumbs behind.

On that note, I dare the stupid ants to come, I'll sit tight with my chalk and poison spray and defend my territory.