The Invasion - The Battle Rages

After searching the outside perimeter of my house and finding no signs of any active fire ant mounds, I merely lay down some Sevin Dust along the edges of my carpeting on the inside. The dust does not kill a nest, it usually just acts as a fairly effective barrier. The ants, apparently not entirely stupid creatures, know it is toxic and avoid it if they can. It kills more than the few who travel through it because they carry it back and others "groom" them and come in contact with it. But it never reaches the queen and, so, the nest lives on.

I am almost convinced I have been through an isolated incident. A foray by a few ants in search of food though, deep in my brain, I know that can't be so.

I was working the "graveyard" shift. That is, from 11:30 PM to 7:30 AM each night. And Faye was working for a tax preparation company in the afternoon and evenings. That meant that I, who slept from noon till 6 or 7 PM, would wake up to an empty house. An often dark one if I slept late.

One evening, a day or two after the First Encounter, I wandered out to the kitchen in search of nourishment. After turning on the light, I walked over to the sink and noticed something odd. Movement. There were some dishes in the sink, dishes left by Faye earlier in the day. On the dishes were ants. Lots of ants. They were cleaning the plates. And silverware. And carrying bits of whatever they found back toward their nest.

Picture a crowded highway from a helicopter flying overhead. Picture 6 lanes, 3 in each direction, packed with cars. But, instead of cars, there are ants. Three lines moving in each direction. Half toward the sink and half in the other direction.

I follow the trail back along the countertop, to the baseboard and along it, to the wall, up the wall a short space to an electrical outlet. The ants are going into, and coming out of, the bottom of the outlet's baseplate.

The nest is in the wall!

They found a way in from outside into the kitchen wall from a mound I had tried to kill not so very long ago. Silly me, thinking I could wipe them out with none escaping when the mound was up against the wall of the house.

There are some fire ant poisons which kill the mound. These are slow acting toxins which cling to the ants and which are ingested by other ants as they groom them and which get into the food brought back by the ants and eventually reach the queen. Or so the theory goes. They work well enough on outside ant mounds. Sprinkle a little around the entrance to the mound, locate and sprinkle more around any "back door" entrances to the mound, and a few days later the mound is no longer active. This stuff smells like a broken sewer pipe, however. I don't like to use it inside the house and it really isn't supposed to be used inside. Especially if you have pets or small children. I had a cat then and as annoying as he was, I had no desire to kill him.

So I grab the Sevin Dust and the fire ant poison dust, carefully remove the baseplate cover from the outlet, and gently block the path of the ants, placing just a little of the fire ant poison in the outlet's box. I am hoping that I might kill off the nest in this way.

The next day and evening shows no sign of the ants. I am hopeful. But I am no optimist. I know things are never this easy when it comes to these devils.

The weekend comes and I slip, for two days, back into the normal sleeping pattern of humans. But early Sunday morning I wake up to a sharp pain on my cheek. A fire ant is biting me. On my face. In my bed. They are back! Well, actually, they never left. They just moved on, in the wall, along the east end of the house from the kitchen past the master bedroom closet to the master bedroom itself.

The next several days are spent coaxing them through the bedroom (by dusting areas behind them, thereby cutting off retreat) toward the master bathroom. This takes a week. But I finally get them into the bathroom wall, behind the sink. I am tracking them by the number of ants in any one area. The larger the number, the closer to the main body. I must keep them moving or they will create a new nest.

I now use more of the fire ant poison. Some will still survive to travel on, to seek a safer place for the eggs they carry, for a new nest. They are as determined to survive as I am to rout them.

I see no sign of them a day after their arrival beneath the bathroom sink. I worry. Have they found a way to double back? Will I have to fight them in the bedroom again? Have they crossed the barriers of dust I had laid to find an internal wall to nest in? They shouldn't nest in internal walls, there is no insulating foam or fiberglass to build nests in those.

I am cleaning the cat's litterbox on the back porch. It sat, at that time, near the outside wall of the master bathroom. I notice movement, a line, a column of ants on the move toward the pool along the bottom of that wall.

I am faced with the dilemma of military commanders at the end of a great battle. Do I try to cut off all avenues of escape and annihilate them? What if a few hardy ones slip away, back into the house, and rebuild their forces? Do I let them slip away unmolested, hoping to cut them off somewhere else, in another campaign where my homeland is not so vulnerable?

I allow them to take their dead and wounded and retreat with honor. I salute them and vow to vanquish them from my yard in the near future... Knowing I will fail. Knowing, some day, they will own the earth and humans will be the species which became extinct.