Victim of an ant invasion

Ants, ants in your pants." That's one of the childhood songs we used to sing when I was a kid. It reminded me of the problem we've been having with ants recently. I awoke last Wednesday morning to discover hundreds of ants invading my kitchen counter tops. Little tiny black ants were swarming all over the place. No food was out for them to eat, but maybe they hungered for something else. Perhaps they were thirsty for water?

My first thoughts were to kill them but when I looked for the ant poison in the laundry room, I found none. Oh well, guess I could find something else - Comet (great for scouring), Windex (with ammonia-D) "409" (kills grease and grime), liquid Cascade, Lysol disinfectant spray, which "kills viruses, bacteria, mold and mildew," so the can said.

I tried them all, each one after another. I didn't mix the various chemicals together though as I might have created my own toxic mess in the kitchen. The thick liquid products that I circled around the ants did the best job, even though it didn't kill them, it contained them very well. We live pretty far out of town so I waited until the next day to go to the store and purchase some official ant killing poison and attend my Yoga class at the same time.

I got some "Combat Quick Kill Formula," and also as a back-up, I purchased a box of "Grants Kills Ants" that promised to destroy the entire colony by bringing back the poison for the queen to eat. I wondered just what these ant colonies are like. After digging around (so to speak), I learned that the colonies, also referred to as nests, are organized a lot like our cities. The ants live together as social insects and they help each other and share their food and their work. Some of them feed and care for the young while others may keep the nest clean or guard the entrances to the nest. Some ants actually take care of little mushroom gardens deep in their nests. They're remarkable.

I learned about the three classes of ants in every colony - the female queens, the lazy males and the sterile workers. So the queens are the mothers and they lay eggs while the males do none of the work except to mate with the queen ants. Something's wrong here.

Anyway, the two ant-killing chemical products that I put out did the trick as I saw no more ants in my kitchen. The next morning, however, there were hundreds of little black ants all over our upstairs bathroom. They must be pretty sturdy as they've been living here on earth for over 100 million years.

-- Linda Monohan can be reached at 782-5802.