Late last summer I was upstairs working on the computer, when I heard Doug say something. “What?” I yelled toward the downstairs. “Bugs!!” he yelled back loudly. That was odd, he’s not normally worried about a bug or two.
I meandered downstairs to see if there was a new kind of bug in our house. Doug was in the kitchen spraying a cleaner on hundreds of small insects that were swarming all over the kitchen floor tile. I looked closer— those were small flying ants! How odd that there was a hatch of flying ants in our kitchen! We’ve had ants off and on, finding holes and cracks in our walls and window frames, on their way to finding the sticky honey jars in our cupboards. But we’d never had numbers like this, moving every which way inside the house. Doug sprayed the ants to keep them from flying, then we wiped them up with towels. They just kept coming. It was an invasion! We wished we had lizards to go with the ants.
During our Peace Corps time in the Gambia, we would see hatches of termites right outside our house. They would crawl out from tiny dirt chimneys they had built, winged termites trying to fly before the push-up lizards and geckos found them. The lizards would surround those eruptions of termites and eat so many that their abdomens would distend and they could barely move. But even in that buggy country, we had never had a hatch inside the house.
The flying ants (and termites) are a reproductive life stage, a way to start new colonies. As I was refreshing my memory on the lifestyles of ants, I found a very cool entomology blog. The ant article was here, but there was much more: https://blog.entomologist.net/why-do-some-ants-fly-and-others-don-t.html.
We figured that last year’s ant invasion was just an odd one-time event. I mostly forgot about the incident. Fast forward to this summer. Our kitchen had been buggier than normal. We had earwigs and sow bugs showing up regularly on our counters and floors. I hate earwigs. Do they really enter our ears? I’ll have to check the entomologist blog. After killing more bugs than normal in my kitchen, I finally decided to check outside around our foundation and see if there was a crack they were coming in through. I looked down low near the ground under the siding directly below our kitchen window. There wasn’t a crack. There was a deep hand-sized hole in the cement. You could see the kitchen sink drain pipe. That must be how the bugs were getting in.
We had been doing many projects around the house, and luckily I had some leftover cement repair mix. I mixed up two cups of the fast-setting cement, and filled that hole as best I could, pushing it up under the siding and squishing it into the opening with gloved hands.
That night I went to a meeting. My son walked downstairs at one point and found a horde of bugs carpeting the floor in front of the kitchen cabinets. The return of the flying ants! Chris hurriedly called Gramma over from next door and they vacuumed and sprayed and vacuumed some more. By the time I got home there was another smaller mass of ants crawling out below the cabinets. I spent the rest of the evening until bedtime intermittently vacuuming up the unwanted house guests. Eventually they slowed down. In the morning the floors were clear.
Later that day I put another layer of cement patch over the large hole outside. In the evening the ants came out again. But there were far fewer. I was tired by then, so I brought my wheeled office chair down, staged my vacuum near me, and vacuumed while seated and having a beer. I prepared dinner, then sat and vacuumed some more while dinner baked.
The next night Doug was home from a fishing trip, and the ants came out again! He vacuumed and cooked dinner with a beer in hand. It was becoming a thing. I got to drink a beer comfortably seated on the couch, while giving Doug advice on how often to suck up the ants. We wives are good at giving advice.
I initially thought that I had just pissed off the bugs by blocking a hole to their nest, and therefore they were trying to escape via my kitchen. But outside along the path between my mom’s house and ours, there was a different flying ant hatch happening. So maybe the ants in my kitchen were just coincidental. But, if I blocked their hole, how did they get into the kitchen? Are they living under my cabinets, or in my walls, and the hole was how they accessed outside? Have I fully closed that hole? Is there another hole allowing access? Are they planning to take over my whole house? Or maybe the world? Is the invasion over or is it the beginning of a long war?
The ants entered my kitchen for several nights, beginning during the warmest part of the afternoon, and continuing until the evening started to cool. Each night there were fewer ants. I must admit that I never even thought of calling an exterminator, until my aunt suggested it. But it’s fall, the weather is wonderful, and we have fun things to do. I don’t want to make an appointment and waste a day of good weather waiting for somebody to come and spray my house. I’m sure last night was the final night of the invasion and we will have no more ant trouble. This year. I’m afraid I won’t know for sure if I have blocked their entry until flying ant season late next summer. Will there be another indoor ant invasion, or will they all be outside where they belong? I should probably look into getting some house geckos.
P.S. These ants are not carpenter ants. They are the smaller kind. Apparently, there are several species around here, and I haven’t taken the time to learn how to key them out. Too busy vacuuming.
