Then for the past few years I would see this trail of ants outside coming into the house through cracks in the brick. It was a long battle against these unruly beasts and I’m pretty sure I never really won the battle.
I had confirmation of that two nights ago. I was starting to see a few ants here and there in the basement bathroom. Let’s keep in mind that I had just renovated the thing and now the drywall ceiling had been ripped out and all I can see are the joists now. I figured that I must have opened the floodgates.
So Sunday night comes (the night that I need a hella lot of sleep after a wild weekend) and I’m killing a few ants here and there, including these crazy big winged ants. https://www.thespruce.com/
I’m not thinking too much about it…I have laid a few traps and that will sort them out. Then my brother in law John looks up and says “OH RYAN CHECK THIS OUT.”
Above the bathroom window in between the joists are hundreds of ants. Hundreds. It’s like…horror movie bad. OH MAN.
We figure the only thing to do without Raid in the house is to vacuum those suckers up. So that’s what I do. I go to town on them and Vero finds some ant control powder but because the powder isn’t exactly easy to apply when you are trying to dump it out upwards into the ceiling, she had to make a paste out of it.
I have to say, the paste seemed to have worked! After dumping the ants from the shopvac into a garbage bag with poison outside the house, I spied a few lethargic ants hanging around that paste. They were under control until I could get some Raid the next day.
Fast forward to the next evening, I picked up some Ant insecticide (rated good for indoors, but not safe for children of course) and I sprayed a bunch of times into this crack of wood above the bathroom window. A few came out and I swear I heard some kind of sizzling noise from the area but it was hard to tell since the window was open and I thought “Huh, is that sound just coming from outside?”. I go outside, nothing is there and then I get distracted by the hot tub and go have one with John.
A few hours later Maureen decides to go down to bed and then comes up and says “Uh guys, there’s like…a lot of ants on the floor.” John and I look at each other and think “Oh yeah, we’ve seen a few. Let’s go check it out.”
I take back my previous comment about last night’s scene being a horror movie. THIS HAS NOW BECOME A FULL BLOWN HORROR MOVIE.
There are a thousand ants crawling outside the bathroom door. They were starting to invade the bedroom where my niece is sleeping. We open the bathroom door and the floor is just littered with ants that have taken the poison and are writing in pain, lethargically crawling around. Some guys are faster than others and are on the run from whatever hell has been unleashed on them. It was ridiculous.
Those ants just kept coming and coming and coming out of this crack above the bathroom window. As far as I can tell, I think they have built a nest in between the outside brick and the exterior wall. I’m really not sure at this point. Hours of vacuuming and poison finally got them under control. I was worried to go to bed and all I could think about is how many ants would be there after sleeping for six hours. Luckily this morning, there were only a hundred or so.
My only fear now is that I did some research AFTER THE FACT and it says that if they are carpenter ants (which I’m pretty sure they are), do not use insecticide on them because they will just try and escape their nest and build satellite nests all over your house. So I may have just screwed us over. But at least I have tens of thousands dead ants in a garbage bag and Lord knows what kind of empty nest up in the wall.