In Tuesday’s blog I wrote about how my two-week staycation had begun with an invasion of large ants. On Tuesday night I made a grim and gross discovery regarding their entry, progress, and apparent ending.
Monday had been a bad day. I was throwing ants out of my house all day while trying to reach our Terminix technician. On Tuesday I hadn’t seen very many of them, so I relaxed my guard a little. I wondered, with desperate optimism, if they’d taken the hint and moved on. (I know that’s not how ants work, as I would soon be reminded.)
Later that night, long after everything was closed, I decided to go into my basement to scout something for a DIY project we’re planning to begin once my wife gets home. And that’s when I noticed the ant corpses. Only a few of them, strung up along old cobwebbing near the floor. I began to worry that they’d “moved on” to take over the basement. It only took a little more inspecting to discover I was partially correct.
Along the opposite wall, I first noticed a pile of dirt and possibly wood chips atop an extended light switch. When I looked down, there was a slightly broader pile… and atop that, a legion of large black ants. There were a lot of them, enough to make me jump back in a fright. I noticed some of them were moving, but most of them were very clearly dead. Regardless, I had three things that were supposed to be outside on the inside of my house, in the middle of the night, and I was (and still am) all alone.
You know that line from that “Class of 99/Suncreen” song, where the narrator says something like, “The real problems in your life are going to be the ones that blindside you on some idle Tuesday”? Welp. That’s exactly what happened to me.
I called everyone I knew in a panic. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I called my wife who is on vacation, my parents in another state, and my friends. My support system all advised me to do the same thing; vacuum them up and get them out. So that’s exactly what I did.
After taking photographic evidence to show to Terminix I grabbed our little shop-vac and sucked up the corpses and survivors alike. My panicked comedy continued as I realized I didn’t know how to actually empty a shop-vac, so I just threw away the whole bag inside. If I have to get another one, fine. I didn’t want surviving ants crawling around in there all night and somehow getting out again.
I ended my night by eating all the ice cream in the house.
Yesterday morning I found one ant by the indoor trash and escorted it out, but didn’t see any more since the basement discovery. I went downstairs at multiple intervals to see if any more ants had journeyed into the basement, but found no evidence of further intruders. For now.
Here’s what I think happened: the ants got into the house from the outside via their usual tunneling and ran into the regular treatments Terminix puts down around the house to keep insects out. They got poisoned, traveled further into the house in an attempt to escape it and wound up in a pile of corpses on my basement floor. That may be way off, but I’m not an insect expert and it’s my best guess. My Terminix technician and an additional inspector will be by next week to take a look. In the meantime I just have to remain vigilant.
And by vigilant I mean paranoid as hell.
What if they’re still in the walls? Did they chew up parts of my foundation and I’m going to have a massive repair bill? Is my house going to fall apart now? Did I see more dirt on top of the light switch since I vacuumed it up or was that just dirt that I missed the first time? What was that thing I saw moving out of the corner of my eye? Is that a crumb on the floor or is it an ant? Why are there crumbs on the floor DON’T YOU KNOW THIS IS HOW YOU GET ANTS?!
My staycation has been off to a great start.