Monday, December 21, 2009

They Come With The Rain.

What, you ask, comes with the rain? Blossoms, thunderclouds, slick roads and pavements? Yes to all those things, but all of them have some redeeming feature: blossoms are wonderful to look at and smell while thunderclouds are marvelous to look at and they bring rain. OK so I can't think of a redeeming feature of slick roads and pavements.

What I'm talking about walks on six legs and is unbelievably persistent. You guessed it--Ants.

When my youngest son, Glenn, was six or so he used to get rid of ants in a very creative way. His line of ants used to come up the drain in the bathroom he shared with his brother. He would run for a plain ordinary kitchen knife you use to round out a place setting at the table; then he would tap it near the drain hole and voila back down the drain they'd go never to be seen again. I think somehow they associated that tapping with a Giant right out of a storybook. I'd try that approach but the drain in the kitchen leads to the garbage disposal and as much as I'd like to turn them into mulch they'd find a way to get around the blades or they'd die and come back to haunt me.

These pesky invaders are unbelievably persistent, to the point that I now find them everywhere: I'm sitting in an overstuffed chair in a room down from the kitchen where ants traditionally make their inroads and suddenly one of the pesky creatures will appear crawling on me. I feel like I'm in the middle of the movie The Birds only with insects the terrifying spector.

One of the major problems has been I can't locate a trail (just found one crawling on my laptop). If you can't locate a trail you can't get rid of them. They used to come in through a window
in our kitchen, down the wall below it ; then parade across the floor toward the refrigerator with a stop at the kitchen counter. My husband said he thought they came in a window over the kitchen sink and I dutifully sprayed around it but they came in anyway--but not from around the window, of course.

Speaking of the refrigerator. Never did we have these things inside the refrigerator. Now we have a fancy new model, a side by side with the freezer on one side and the refrigerator on the other with a little place where you can load up a glass with water and ice on the freezer door. I mean this is an expensive machine--gorgeous--the latest in technology but can it keep out ants? No. I spray the doors with ant spray and the next morning find a pile of dead ants at the bottom of the freezer door. They are pretty dumb creatures after all. They go for the freezing temperatures and ignore a much more nifty source of goodies next door.The old refrigerator, while a lot less nifty never let in an ant.

I have now taken to religiously cleaning up the area around the sink before we head up the stairs for the night, as well as spray areas where I've found them (with a spray safe for food, children and pets no less) and they still come in.

OK Reader--wherever you are--Help!





5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah...

The only ant solution is - if you can - to freeze everything you have that's sweet. Make room in there!

Heidi the Hick said...

Ants? Too cold up here right now!

(Merry Christmas to you and yours!)

Heidi Willis said...

Oh!! It must be a CA thing because I remember those exact things! I used to have EVERYTHING in the pantry in plastic ziplock bags!! How I HATED those millions and millions of ants that trailed across my kitchen from sliding glass door to pantry!!

I kept things in plastic bags when we moved to VA only to discover ants are not the problem. And mice don't seem to be hindered by bags.

So everything is now in tupperware.

:)

Erin Halm said...

Marsh,

We had an ant problem in our kitchen here in Brazil and we did two things. One, we never left anything sweet out. We put it all in the frig or in ziplocks and we found the hole in the tiled wall where they were coming in and sealed it up. Like you said, finding the source is the key, but you might have multiple sources, so it isn´t easy.

marsh to the fore said...

I'm now thinking our problem comes from behind our refrigerator and it's too heavy for me to move so at some point I'll ask my "menfolks" to look into it.

In the meantime I've been slack about putting things away in the frig and need to do that.