One thing always leads to another. Water in the basement begets relocating the cat food upstairs into the bathroom since the dark damp swamp mildews the food. Tilly, the troublemaker, refuses to eat out of a bowl. She must pull the kibble out and push it around before intake. Thus, little bits of consumables are scattered around the area.
Feline food is drenched in oil to reduce the instances of hairball vomit. Good thing. Bad thing when wee brown ants are attracted to the oil and attempt to carry fragments down a small crack in the shower caulk to their colony. The cat food has been in the bathroom before but this is the first time that ants decided to swarm the calories. It’s a horrible sight to see hundreds of ants inside the house.
Swept and mopped up the ants. Washed out the basin of the shower with water to get rid of the food oils and cover up the scent trail of ants for their hive-mates. Located the crack in the tile where the ants emerge and caulked it. Took the food outside in sieve and shook it until all the ants had tumbled into the grass. Crushed the random ant seeking its way back to the now closed tunnel. I had to reseal the entrance and squash ants for two days. Felt a little guilty about annihilating this segment of their population. However, there are hundreds of ant colonies thriving in my flower garden and yard.
It has been a tough year for ants. I’m sure that their underground hives have been continuously flooded. One colony relocated some its eggs onto several milkweed plants. Noticed the first monarch flying around on June 18th. Sadly, I haven’t located any monarch caterpillars. I’ve found a few milkweed leaves with signs of nibbling but no bugs. Last year, I hatched fifty butterflies during June. Another twenty or so died due to an infestation of a fly, which laid its larva inside the caterpillar and the butterfly died in-vetro when the fly would emerge. The flowers are slow to bloom this year. Global warming sucks.
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