For 2 weeks, I have had very small ants wandering around the TV room and adjacent kitchen. They show up just inside the deck door, the kitchen windowsill, and on the backsplash board on the counters.
OK, ants seek food and sometimes they find their way into the house, but they aren't acting normal! There is no trail of ants going anywhere. There is no sign of them outside the house. There is no paricular entry point I can detect. There are never more than a few at a time, but there are ALWAYS a few any time I look.
They aren't in the pantry at some loose food box (I moved everything around and looked with a flashlight), they aren't at the cat food bowls, they aren't in the cabinets (flashlight again), they aren't even at the compost bin which is the main thing I would think would attract ants.
They aren't in the ceiling of the basement below the kitchen or the TV room.
Hey, this is vaguely sounding like a Dr Seuss poem... I'll have to work on that idea!
I sprayed only once right under the base of the deck door inside and out (and then cleaned the exposed floor because the cats found the smell interesting). I'm not too worried about the effect of the (organic) ant spray on cats because the stuff won't even annoy wasps and wasps evolved FROM ants (or vice versa) so they are very closely related, but why take chances. But the limited spraying had no effect on the few ants visible at all times.
The point is that I can't figure out WHERE they are coming from, WHY they are in here, WHAT is keeping them searching around, or WHEN they are most commonly seen. It seems completely constant, yet completely random.
I've probably killed over a thousand by finger and shoe. It doesn't seem to make any difference if I kill them or not. When I crush all the visible ones, there about as many in 10 minutes. Yet after not bothering them all night, there are still ONLY as many in the morning.
ON THE OTHER HAND, I haven't yet had a fruit fly (aka fungal gnats) yet this year, and I usually have problems with them by now. I'm pretty sure the ants aren't catching the fruit flies, but bigger theories have been proposed on such coincidental observations, LOL!
I expect the ants will simply stop appearing in a few days and I will never know why they where here or why they left. It will be one of those mysteries of nature; those "Ants In My Midst".
2 comments:
Oh man, I hate ants! Ok, I hate any bug inside the house and most outside.. but that's besides the point! We've had random ants running around weird places for the last few years. And yeah, not where there's an abundance of food, it's weird.. One thing I do know, when you squish one, they let out a scent that draws other ants to come get the body.. Gross, but efficient. We did have some ants come down the chimney, but we have a weird set up and it was when the flying ants swarm. I figure they got caught in a breeze and tumbled down and came out of the huge space between the water heater and the furnace. Spraying in there seems to have stopped them. Thank goodness!
Hope you get to the end of yours soon!
How annoying. Twice we've had an infestation of ants, but it was easy to solve where they were getting in. You might have to get in a professional exterminator. I know they do have pet friendly sprays or poison that they use, if you tell them. Good luck!
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