I kill them. If I have to renounce the vegan title, I will. I've had one invasion that made a little headway, and I've heard horror stories of people trying to get rid of ant invasions. They are smart and they are tough and they are organized. The spiders, on the other hand, hang out in every corner unmolested; and I have a shy silverfish living in my bathroom.
My dudes live on the outside of my building, and since the first ants are scouts, I've realized that ruthlessly killing the first ones takes care of the problem each year. Well... the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. I don't mean humans, I mean the many ants who would die if they found food, brought the message back to the nest, and then made a real invasion, and I had to move from book-to-ant combat, to chemical means.
I wish the cats would kill them, then I could keep my hands clean. But she does spot them, which helps. We just killed three in a row.
Medieval Days and Ways, and a kleenex, are on the floor ready in case she spots another--she's periodically checking. I'll have to check Fernando's room tomorrow, cause in the past, when it was our living room, it was the scene of frequent invasions--it's nearer the lawn.
You can poke your head out the window and see the ant highway traveling along the building at times. My goal each year is to send the message: Beyond that window, our brave scouts did not return. Move along, move along.
update: she just took a nap, then found me a 4th - those ants won't know what hit 'em
update: that's a lot of ants. These might not be scouts - scouts might have learned that I feed Minion in this room, and they've come to collect! I'd better move her back to the bathroom. (I feed her here so she won't eat Haley's food, the little thief. Minion sucks up her portion like a hoover, then races over to Haley's. Haley had taken to grabbing her soft food in one clump and running off with it!)
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RadioLab did a thing on ants recently. Apparently, ants carry their dead back to an ant graveyard - if you left those little corpses where you killed them, they'd be gone by morning.
The interviewed ant researcher found the chemical that ants were responding to when one of their kind is dead and wondered what would happen if he scented a live ant with it...
The live ant was scooped up by his fellow ants (HEY! Let me go! I'm not dead!!) and deposited on the corpse-mound with the other bodies despite his protests of being alive. If, after climbing back out, he didn't clean himself well enough, his fellow ants would grab him again and toss him back on the pile.
Ahh! Poor guy!
They always seem to know, so maybe they can smell the death-juice on the floor. I haven't seen a single ant since, and that was just one night of carnage.
Though now I feel like I didn't let them bury their dead. :-( It's gonna turn into one of those weird Earth 2 episodes, where I think I'm being menaced by ants, but no, they're just here mourning, come back to claim the bodies I put in the trash with the kleenexi.
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