Ants and Bees

Lumber Liquidators is almost two weeks late on the delivery. I just called and they now promise it on Monday. Today is Friday and I'm tired and cranky and mad at the lumber people for being late and making excuses.

Oh yeah, and we have carpenter ants in our house.

I enjoyed having a swarm of bees move in with us a few months ago. We paid some bee guy a lot of money (when I could have done it) to take away the bees and give them a new home, and I was sad to see him drive off with them. Bees and ants are similar in their philosophies and work ethic, so you would think they deserve my equal affection--but the bees were not inside the house where I could see them. The ants have crossed the line and I want them dead.

Apparently, even if you wished it to be true, it is not practical to relocate carpenter ants and give them another chance. A single colony of ants will have a series of networks with satellite nests, some of which are within the walls of your house (especially old houses like ours) and some are outside in trees. Each of these nests has its own queen but these all pay allegiance to the main nest (which is usually outside in a big tree) and its supreme queen. Pretty cool.

All of this is according to our eco-friendly pest guy who came today. If a satellite nest gets into trouble, a lesser queen from a nearby nest will learn of it from the worker females who spread such gossipy news. That queen will lay extra queen eggs and have them transported to the troubled site, given them the ability to set up new quarters. So they are adaptable, doing such things for countless centuries.

And yet they must die. We are going to kill them. No, not just run them off, but kill them with this special bait that the ants will carry from nest to nest, infesting them with a horror that happens to be non-toxic to humans and our pets.

Maybe this is all we can expect from ourselves . We have good intentions but sometimes we just want to wipe our enemies off the face of the earth. I'm going to take a nap.