Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Die Hard

I destroyed a team of scout ants this morning.

They came in our third story pad from either the deck door, which does end up open throughout the day, or through the shoddy craftsmanship in the walls. Tiny buggers, and apparently expert climbers no matter the way they arrived.

I may have jumped a bit when I noticed them because I'm not a lover of stinging insects, and when I notice out of the corner of my eye something mobile that shouldn't be there I immediately think of the gigantic wasps we saw in Belize.

They are the size of hummingbirds, but clearly have stingers and wasp-like qualities. We named them hummingbees.

How we came across one was luck, because apparently they keep away from people and to themselves. However, they do come out to sting and paralyze tarantulas before dropping off some eggs inside the spider for use as a live host. Awesome, and fucking scary as all fuck.

So I notice the ants, squeal a bit, possibly pee myself. Then I vacuum them up and go about my day. Until I start thinking about how these advance ant cells work.

Do they scout out an area before reporting back to their brethren and then all converge on the area to take over like Arabs with gas stations and Dunkin Donut's?

(Donuts? Donutses? Donuts's'es?)

Or, and the reason I'm running out to grab some attack chemicals, does their lack of a return to base camp after a specified time signal to their posse that it's time to roll out regulator style?

(Mount up!)

All I know for sure is I don't want a repeat of my childhood home in Utah where we came in one day from school to a few flies lazily buzzing around the stairs. Then, as we head past them to the basement for a little original nintendo action we see the entire double-wide downstairs windows covered in flies. Not 40-50 flies buzzing around in a little game of insect ass-grab, we're talking thousands and thousands of flies clinging to the windows. It was some sort of fly species that travels in packs searching for specific temperatures to chillax in. Apparently that time of year and our unfortunate luck brought them into our basement. All of them.

Side note: It took my dad 2 hours to set up the original Nintendo to our television when it first came out. If I'm not mistaken it was two cords with a total of 4 plugs, one of those plugs clearly a wall plug, and the other three clearly matching input/output plugs on either the Nintendo or the TV.

Have a good day. And if you know what's good for you you'll shake your shoes out this morning because there's probably a brown recluse in there.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have been relocating ants for the past two days as well.

First, find the 10,000 lbs. cat.

Second, find a few ants running up wife's shirt, after very through check in the shirt for other ants, place ant in hand, put the boob back.

Last, place ant in front of 10,000 lbs cat, instant amusement!

Better if solid amounts of alcohol are consumed.