New House Blog: Episode XXXXVI - THEM!

Happy New Year and welcome back to the New House Blog.  Thank you for joining is in our first Episode of the new year.  You may have noticed that there have not been any Back Yard Archaeology updates in quite a while.  This is because, just like a lot of professional dig sites, we have both a digging season and a non-digging season at our dig sites.  We are now in the middle of our non-digging season, due in large part to the cooler weather and the shorter daylight hours.  However, even though digging is suspended until the season reopens, we are still working as hard as ever at researching the mosaic tiles we've extracted (seen in this Episode) and trying to correctly reconstruct their original pattern.

THEM!

Our new house was invaded recently.  Not by humans or small furry animals.  No, our New House was invaded by a force more insidious than either man or mammal (I know, man is technically a mammal, but just go with it).  We were invaded by THEM!

That's right, folks - giant mutant ants, and lots of them.  And when we say giant we mean small black ants.  As far as being mutants, we can't prove that they aren't, so that designation stays.

We first noticed them apparently sneaking under the frame of our sliding glass door, in the kitchen area.  They were headed mostly straight for the garbage and recycling can area.  Then we noticed them on the other side of the kitchen, crawling up the cabinet and feeding on a mote of food that did not get cleaned off of the stove-top.  Did I mention that they chose January 1, 2013, for their invasion?  Happy New Year!  Anyway, we didn't want to use regular RAID or Black Flag, or some other such insecticide inside, because of the cats, so it was a run to the store to get some pet-safe ant spray and ant traps.  While I was out getting the anti-ant chemicals Becky waged a might squishing war against the invaders, but they just kept coming.

I got home and we battled the ants together.

Naturally we prevailed, for even mutant ants are no match for two human brains working together.  We defeated the ants and mopped the kitchen floor to get rid of the ants' chemical trails and to get rid of the dead ants and anti-ant spray that was on the floor.  Then we thoroughly caulked around the sliding glass door frame to seal up any small gaps.  Next we carried the fight outdoors by spraying known ant trails, spraying any actual ants we found, putting traps by our orange trees, and spraying the entire perimeter of the house as a preventive measure.

No more ants.  

Or so we thought.

THEM! Part II

Shortly thereafter, on the same day, we casually looked behind the shower curtain in our downstairs bathroom and we discovered more ant invaders.  They had invaded our home on two different fronts!  Is any more evidence necessary to prove that these were indeed mutant ants?  Would normal ants think to invade at two different points?  Anyway, they were crawling about in the bathtub, mostly concentrated near the water spout and drain areas.  It took us a while, but eventually we discovered that this branch of ants was coming from within the bathroom wall, and they were entering the tub through a small gap at the base of the tub's water spout.  With this discovery we were properly prepared to step up our ant assault and be rid of the foul fiends.  Off came the tub spout, the shower handle, and the metal plate behind the shower handle.  Into the wall went the ant poison.  In this case we used a non-pet-safe product and we kept the door closed so the cats would not get into that bathroom.  

After a thorough chemical attack on the ants we watched and waited.  We watched and waited a long time.  No more living ants came through the holes in the wall.  We thought we had probably won the war again, but there was only one way to be sure - we would have to open up the wall to be sure we had exterminated this ant invasion.  Opening up the tub side was out of the question - it's a one-piece fiberglass insert with holes for the shower head, shower handle, water spout, drain, and drain lever.  The other side of the wall in in my office, and it's just plain drywall, so we went in from that side and no living ants were seen anywhere nearby.  We had won.  

The tub ant war led to a new repair project that will be described in a future Episode - the replacement/upgrading of the shower valve, shower handle, shower head, tub spout, and all related piping and plumbing.  We figured that since we had the wall opened up already and we had the new parts already, it would be a good time to tackle this project.

THEM! Part III

While we were battling the ants in the bathtub (it was more than a one-day battle) we noticed more ants in the kitchen, concentrated mainly around the stove/oven area and the sink area.  We also noticed that they were avoiding the areas of the cabinet that had been sprayed with the (pet-safe eco-friendly) anti-ant spray.  These ants were not crossing the floor from the sliding glass door area - they were coming from somewhere in the cabinet/stove/sink area.  It turns out that they had invaded on THREE fronts, not just the two fronts we suspected in Part II above.  

For a few days we squished and sprayed and wondered exactly where these ants were entering from.  We would  wipe them out and think we had figured it out only to see them again later in the same area.  We finally found them emerging from inside the lower cabinet on the left side of the oven, and we decided to try out some new ant baits.  In went the ant baits.  Against the cabinet door went a heavy tool box (to keep the cats out).  We followed the directions for the ant baits and waited and watched, and, like the instructions said  would happen, we first saw a massive increase in ants in the cabinet, then the numbers dwindled over a few days, until at last there were no living ants to be seen.  We had won the war.  

They tried to get in on three fronts.  They tried to discourage us by continually coming back.  But in the end they succumbed to their own greed and desire for tasty (to the ants) ant poison.  The end.

It's either us or

    bIsh