The Ants Go Marching, Dammit!

Of all God’s creatures, the ones I find to be the most inconvenient are the common “little black ants”, which a website at Texas A&M tells me are almost certainly Monomorium minimum. They are common all over the Los Angeles area, and they are the only kind I’ve actually seen invade my house. Sometimes they’ll come in for food, but more usually they seem to be seeking water.

In our previous house, we learned that we needed to disconnect the garden hose from the faucet by the back door when we were done with it. Otherwise, the ants would crawl up the outside of the house to the faucet, and then follow the pipe into the wall and thence into our kitchen cabinetry.

One summer in that same house I woke up with a creepy-crawling feeling—and there were little black ants all over the bed. They were coming up the outside wall, through the bedroom window, and down the wall into bed with us. As I recall, we moved the bed away from the wall, stripped it, put the bed clothes in the washing machine, applied insecticide as seemed good to us, took showers, and then didn’t sleep much.

The good side is, while it’s revolting to have ants on you, they don’t bite. They squish easily, and you can wipe them off of a counter with a sponge. Rinse in the sink and they go down the drain, and they con’t come back.

In our current house we don’t seem them very often. When we do, it’s usually in the heat of summer, and they come into the kitchen for water. When it happens, I figure out where they are coming in, and then go track the train back to the nest. Usually it’s the nest under the bush about six feet or so northwest of the northwest corner of the house. And so I spray the nest, and the trail, and we clean up inside, and have nothing to worry about for a while.

Sometimes it’s the nest just east of the driveway, but usually it’s the nest northwest of the house.

So, we are in the middle of a nasty, nasty drought here in California. We have not been watering our yard much. Everything is bone dry.

So yesterday evening (Sunday, as I write this), we found ants on the kitchen counter. I sent the boys out to scout around, and sure enough it was the nest to the northwest of the house. But there was another column almost all of the way to house from the nest to the west of the driveway. That’s where the garbage cans sit, so they usually find enough to keep them busy without bothering us in the house.

We sprayed both trails and nests, and cleaned up the stragglers, and this morning all was good, except that I needed to clean a bunch of ants out of my Mr. Coffee. (For the record, I ran two pots of hot water, and then hot water and vinegar, and then a couple of more pots of hot water to get rid of the vinegar.)

So this evening (Monday) we spotted more aunts coming in a different window on the north side of the kitchen. I went out with my trusty iPhone (it has a flashlight) and bug spray, and found the trail…going to a new nest in the middle of the patio to the north of the house. Joy! And I’ve sprayed that, and we’ve cleaned up the stragglers (and the counter), and I think we’ve got them contained.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow will bring.