Organizing this cupboard was one of those projects that was certainly not on the list for this week. Here we are, less than a week before we leave on vacation, and I can think of plenty of other jobs I could have tackled around here; but for one simple reason, I dropped everything yesterday and went to work on this one. Ants.
We have been having frequent visits from our resident ant population recently, and I've been trying to figure out their secrets: what do they like best to eat? where do they come from? what kind of poison will kill them best? I tried ant bait traps that I bought at the store; they were supposed to wipe out the entire colony. Yeah, that was a joke. My mother told me about white vinegar; that is supposed to keep them away...so I've been using that daily, and the house smells like a pickle factory. But still the ants march on. I've discovered that we don't have just "sweet" ants or "meat" ants; our ants are attracted to almost anything. A drop of peach juice on the counter? They will find it. Knife in the sink that was used to slice chicken? It will be covered in ants in a short period of time. Tortilla chip crumbs in the scraps container in the sink? They'll be all over it--literally.
In the cupboard that is pictured above, we had stored some candy there. I THOUGHT it was all sealed candy (except for some jelly beans left from Easter which were in an open container, but I noticed they weren't touching them--smart ants). Little did I know that the ants had penetrated the plastic around a lollipop and were evidently making themselves quite at home there.
Yesterday I took everything out of this cupboard, washed the shelf liners, wiped out the shelves with white vinegar (if you come visit us and notice a weird smell in the house, it's probably vinegar!), let it dry, squashed about a zillion ants, replaced the shelf liner, and put the dishes away (in much better order than they had been). Despite the fact that I wasn't planning to do this project anytime soon, it IS a good feeling to have it done. So thank you, ants; I owe it all to you.
Another side benefit of all of this is that my curiosity about ants has grown exponentially--as well as my awe of how God made them. I'm not kidding about this. How in the world do ants find their food? Do they have an extremely good sense of smell? Or do they send out scouts to wander around until they find something, then report back about location? When I see ants traveling in a row to the food and ants traveling in a row away from the food and back, I presume, to their colony, what kind of communication, if any, is going on between the rows of ants? What about when I come along and enact a gigantic massacre of the ants I see; how does that message get communicated back to the rest of them? Do the few that escape return to the colony immediately and give an update? What about when I remove the object of delight that they were getting their food supply from? Can they smell well enough to sense right away that it's gone? Or do they have to crawl out and show up at the scene before they realize that?
One of these days, we'll get some books about ants out of the library and do a little study of them. Until then, I'm left to wonder...how do they do it?
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