Pharaoh Ants Must Die

I staggered bleary-eyed down to the kitchen Saturday morning to get a glass of orange juice and put on water for coffee. Ahh, you gotta love a hangover in a warm, muggy house, ugh. Neither my girlfriend or I are fans of air-conditioning so we tend to only use it on the worst of Washington DC's hot muggy days. Even though early, it was obvious this was going to be one. "Probably won't need to turn on the air if we close the blinds and maybe get a storm this afternoon." I thought. The plan was to do some cleaning, then go for a bike ride and run hills. No need for AC if I was going to sweat all day anyway. It can always be turned on after the sun goes down if it's going to be too unbearable to sleep.

T was still sleeping so I went to the living room to turn on a fishing show while waiting for the water to boil. 'Wanna Go Fishing?' and 'Spanish Fly' are two of my favorites, and I knew that once she got up I'd have to deal with her overwhelming desire to turn the TV to Bravo. Great! Because there's nothing I love more than a bunch of shrieking women on the ninth rerun of a Real Housewives episode! Sorry Munch, I kid because I love.

After a few minutes the water was boiling, so I went back to the kitchen to put coffee into the French Press. Yeah I know, "How gay are you?" Seriously though, T only drinks Diet Coke and I generally only have one cup/mug of coffee so it makes sense counter-space wise. Easy too.

Anyway, while walking to the kitchen I noticed a few ants by the cat's food dish. No big deal, they make a cameo every spring. All we do is put down a few traps and make sure to keep the area around the food dish clear of crumbs. After a day or so they're gone. I opened the cabinet door under the kitchen sink and found a box of ant traps left over from last year. "Still in the cellophane. Schweet!" I thought as I opened one and placed it near the dish. I cleared the area of crumbs and figured the job was done til next year. I was wrong.

Later, after breakfast and showers, T brought the trash down from her bathroom (yes we use separate bathrooms) and headed out to spend the day with her nephew. Unfortunately, there were numerous Diet Coke cans in her trash bag, a hole in the bottom, and she set it next to, rather than in, the kitchen can. Who knew that ants couldn't tell the difference between real sugar and chemical sweeteners? Weird. Never would've figured that. That said, taking the trash out is usually the last thing I do at the end of the day, so I would say the ants had about 7 hours to spread the word before I got to it, and man did they spread it.

Have you ever seen the special about Africa's driver ants? OK, it wasn't quite that bad, but the little pharaoh ants still put on an impressive display. A two way street consisting of hundreds of ants, coming and going around the living room baseboard from the patio door to the kitchen. It looked like rush hour on the Beltway....Only with ants....Rather than cars....Strolling right past the trap put out earlier. Apparently when given the choice between chemical bait and chemical Coke, chemical Coke wins the taste test, feelers down.

We don't have any bug spray and usually there's no need, since our cats have bugs placed high in their food pyramid. For the most part, anything that crawls, flies or wiggles it's way into the house instantly becomes The Most Important Thing In The Universe, until it's demise. I have to assume ants are then either too small or too uninteresting to be bothered with. You would think they'd be tasty with all of their consumed sugar. Let me know.

So, first things first. I removed the trash from the house and cleaned the floor. With no more available food, the ants should start heading for the trap, eventually taking the poison back to the queen and wiping them out. That's what the package says anyway. But no. They kept coming. And coming. And coming. Back and forth the tiny army went around the molding, still heading to the spot where the bag used to be, but now also starting to spread out in different directions, looking for other possible sources of nutrition. Hell, I was starting to wonder how long it would be before I saw a cat dragged out. I made a point of popping into the kitchen (okay, I was getting a new beer), wetting a paper towel, and wiping out the unwanted tourist groups as they accumulated. But they kept coming. First they would go to the spot where the soda was, then spread out. They began heading up the wall and into a food cabinet. It was time to get ugly.

We have a bunch of dried Ghost Peppers that we rehydrate and put into various hot sauces we create. If you've never heard of them, Ghost Peppers or Bhut Jolokias hold the Guinness record for World's Hottest Pepper and are dangerously hot. Weapons Grade hot. I had previously steeped a few (see, another use for the French Press) and put the strained water into a spray bottle in an effort to save our herbs and hot pepper plants from slugs and shrubbery munching felines (should've been running video the first time). So, how would it work on ants? Time to find out. The hope being at the least, the capsaicin from the peppers would eliminate the scent trail, and at best, send them off screaming like gassed rioters in Thailand.

The result? No help. While unpleasant to the point of death for some of the recipients of my homemade tear gas, the flow of ants actually increased! They just went around the sprayed areas. Damn!

I decided to go manual and began hand to ant combat. Every couple hours for the next two days I wiped out the unwanted visitors in the kitchen with a wet paper towel, then went around the baseboard crushing the little bastards with my fingers one by one, leaving their tiny little body's by the trail. I remembered that driver ants will retreat from a battle they consider not winnable and hoped Pharaoh Ants had the same thought process.

During this period, I also continually searched for any reason they might have for their continued assault on the cabinet. I removed everything and cleaned it completely, leaving not a single open package, no ant-edible food, nothing at all to entice them (unless they have some desire for olive oil, hot sauce and vinegar I'm unaware of). Still, they kept coming, and coming, and I kept killing them. I became Shiva - Destroyer of Pharaoh Ant's Worlds, while at the same time slowly becoming aware of the futility of my actions (I'm not even going to tell you T's response to my manually waged war, and is there really an Ant Napalm out there?).

Finally, after days of cleaning and killing, killing and cleaning, I decided to remove everything from the cabinet again, only this time also sticking my head in and giving it a full visual inspection. What did I find wedged down in the front left corner in a gap between the top and bottom shelf? A stupid tiny marshmallow. Covered with stupid tiny ants. Jeez. I can only imagine how bad it would've been had it been a full-sized marshmallow, or a peep.