Bonzer Words!: Home Invasion
...Last Thursday we awoke to find the house had been invaded by millions of tiny black ants. They were everywhere...
Elaine Lutton tells of a need to Spring clean on the grand scale.
Elaine writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
This country (Australia) never ceases to amaze me! You go to bed and all is well and when you wake in the morning the house is moving!
Last Thursday we awoke to find the house had been invaded by millions of tiny black ants. They were everywhere . . . the bathroom, toilet and pantry, not to mention cupboards etc. We grabbed the insect spray and murdered millions but then were left with the untidy corpses. It was Spring Cleaning on the grand scale.
Everything had to be sprayed, washed and put back in place. That evening the second invasion began, but at least we were there to see where they were getting into the house and equip it with special ant bait. The idea is you put down liquid trails for the ants to feed on. They love the stuff. It's like black treacle. They gorge themselves and then carry the poison back to the nest where they pass it on to their mates and the Queen. This form of regicide is supposed to kill the egg-laying Queen and hence get rid of the problem permanently. The interim period when the walls and floors are crawling with ants in a feeding frenzy is not a pretty sight! From the way the ants were moving we suspect we have ant nests in the ceiling and maybe in the cavity walls. We watched them go in and under the light switch in the bathroom. In the toilet you can sit there and watch—and be watched by—thousands of ants crawling on the walls.
We have rung for professional help but they say they cannot come until tomorrow. I think we are low priority in this part of the world as our pests are ants not red-back spiders, termites or even fire ants.
I think my fight-back has earned us a short respite but of course I am left with trails of sticky goo throughout the house which is very resistant to scrubbing. Thank heavens we have tiles everywhere and not carpet. I suspect the professionals will have to spray inside the ceiling. Good luck to them going up through the manhole.
Do you think this could be the beginning of a biological terrorist attack? Bin Laden's come-back! Perhaps Bush was right after all. But I never thought the Fight against Terror would be conducted against extremist soldier ants!
Later:
The professional pest people, a man and a boy both clad in white overalls, arrived as promised. They fumigated behind the walls and in the ceiling and even behind the taps in the kitchen and bathroom. It makes me a little uneasy to think of trillions of tiny bodies entombed within—very Poe-esque. My unease was increased when the large man volunteered his non-shaving offsider to climb into the ceiling space to 'smoke 'em out'. Obviously the days of chimney sweep boys are not entirely over.
The Attenborough explanation for our Entomological Phenomena would seem to be that an Ant Colony attempted to move in but now that we have nuked their Des. Res. we should not have any more problems for several years. Certainly all seems quiet on the Ant Front at the moment. Apart from vacuuming up a few tiny corpses, diminishing in number each day, we seem to be back in the peaceful and pristine condition of Wednesday evening.
© E.P. Lutton
