The Great Ant War of 2015

I feel like I haven’t written in months. Between getting sucked into good books and spending too much time in homeschooling online groups which then evolved into spending too much time reading prepper message boards… add in some work and volunteering, some travel to a conference and not much time or inspiration has been left for writing.

One of the things that have kept me busy is an ant invasion in our home. We had seen a lot of the tiny sugar ants for a while but it wasn’t a huge problem and they were easy to manage as they responded to all of the “home remedies”.

We went away for a weekend to attend the LLL Parenting Conference and we come back to a full fledged invasion. The tiny and friendly ants had been replaced by some mutant, oversized ones that were immune to peppermint, black pepper, garlic, salt, cornstarch, vinegar, etc. They were excellent swimmers and simply refused to drown or even let go of the cloth that I was trying to wipe them with. It was a declaration of war!

I usually have a “live and let live” approach but these aggressive ants did not allow for happy co-existence. I had to let go of my moral conflict and go on the offensive. Thankfully I keep a spider friendly household, I safely evict big spiders and let the Daddy Long Legs live in peace (I’ve even given some of them names, lol). So I told the spiders to earn their keep and relocated them to the ant trails. It was a feeding frenzy! We got a homeschool science lesson out of it and the spiders were happy to help the cause. We had happy spiders with full bellies; but there were many more ants than spiders, it just wasn’t enough. I was done trying the natural and homemade remedies.

After hubby went to Home Depot and bought one of each ant control products we had relief within 24 hours. I was finally able to declare my house ant free…. 

Until I went to outside. It looks like all of the ants have moved to our front yard. I counted 9 separate colonies when there had only been one for the 2 years we’ve lived here. It looks like they are preparing for a siege and invasion. I don’t think that I have enough spiders to handle that army. I had to bring the “guns” outside.

 

The war continues…