Ant-y Time
Posted By Sika on March 16, 2009
There are ants everywhere in Nkhata Bay. Right now I am sitting at the table where we had lunch, watching a horde of them dismantle a drop of semi-congealed soup. There were no ants on the table when we sat down. Now there are hundreds. Most of them are pretty innocuous looking, but there are a few that are larger than the masses, but also with proportionally larger heads, their mandibles visible and vaguely threatening, even though they aren’t doing anything dismantling drops of soup.
This morning there were ants all over the spare bed in our room. I had put my stuff there, judging it to be more ant free and less likely to get wet in case the roof leaked with the oncoming rain. I worried that they had somehow gotten into my bag of snacks, and indeed, a third of the bag was engulfed in the beasts. I picked up a handle and gingerly moved the bag about a foot away from the dead insect the shifting bag had uncovered. The insect was the real focus of the seething mass of crawling things, and having discovered it, I relaxed.
I’ve noticed that ants very rarely want to have much more to do with us than we want to do with them. Generally, when they come in en masse it’s because they’ve discovered some kind of food in your house or because they think your house is a nice place to store the piece of insect they’re in the process of butchering. Or because they’ve decided inside your walls is a nice place to live, which is, admittedly, a bit more problematic.
Sometimes I find a mass of ants in some forgotten part of my house. Usually, they’ve found a dead insect I hadn’t noticed and so I leave them to it, doing my best to remember not to interrupt their busy work. A day or two later, I return to check and find, as I expected, nothing there. The ants have vacated the premises, and as a sort of reverse rent, have taken the dead insect with them. On an installment plan.
Of course, there is the other type of ants, the ones that are rude and climb all over you and bite. They have no manners and should be punished.
That was a great post. Thanks for making me smile.