Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Ants

I just did some research and discovered that there are 11,880 known species of ants in the world. I guess I should be glad that only four of them give us a problem. Three in the house and one outside.

The worst are the fire ants that live in the cactus garden and keep building colonies in the yard of the cabana. I spray the heck out of them and mess up their nests whenever I find them. They are awful little black creatures. You don't even see them until you walk through the grass or dig around to pull weeds or something. And then, Bang! They are all over you and they really hurt. It burns for hours where they bite and they usually do it en masse. I hate them.

And then there are the ones in the house.

There is a big red one that only comes in once in awhile. I don't worry too much about them because they are so infrequent and don't seem to live inside. But they are hard to kill. You have to step on them and twist your foot, like putting out a cigarette. Just stomping on them doesn't work. They just look up and you and go "na-na-na-na-na!" and walk away.

Then there are the medium size ones that do live in the house. They build their nests in door frames, in the electrical sockets and the tiniest crack in the wall you can imagine. What makes them even more difficult to find is that they use the dark grout lines in the floor tiles as their pathways! When we see them we try to follow the line back to the nest. Then they really get it! The whole house smells like Raid! for hours.

Finally there are the small ones. Actually these things are so tiny they look like little black specks and are hard to identify as ants even. They are so tiny they can even get into bottles that have screw lids! We squash them on the countertops and spray but they keep on coming.

We have resigned ourselves to the fact that ants are just a part of life here and that it is an ongoing battle with them. Much less frequent, but even more disgusting, are scorpions, cockroaches and centipedes. But enough about creepy crawlies for one day!

No comments: