I have battled with teensie weensie ants this summer like I have never seen before. Tiny things. Maybe a 16th of an inch. I suspect that they came in bags of mulch.
They have actually given me an opportunity to study them in great detail...not that I wanted to. Interesting little creatures who have invaded my space and in spite of all their talents I want them gone!
What survival skills they have...
They freeze in place on the kitchen counter when I walk into the room...meaning they must have good eyesight. (we have to hit the counter with a fist to get them to run so we can squash them!)
If I lay something on the counter and see no ants, within a few minutes a few scouts come to check it out....indicating a good sense of smell. (and social organization)
They seem to eat anything they can find and being omnivorous means they are not specialized and therefore more likely to survive. I watched them devour an entire cicada in the driveway in two days, and then appear in the front yard swarming an apple.
The bait kind of traps only work for a short time and then they avoid them...does that mean that they learn from their mistakes?
They live in huge colonies and even tho I have sprayed every crack and have cleaned and searched for any possible food source or entry point, and treated the foundation, their sheer numbers mean that the colony goes on.
I have watched them in the yard as they move their entire colony in stages, carrying the eggs and babies across vast (a few yards) distances to outlying pre-prepared bases of operation. In a summer a colony could move miles! Perhaps splitting multiple times along the way. Many thousands of them participate in the migration, meaning they are very prolific. They will diverge from their migration to take advantage of food along the way...like peanut butter blobs dropped on the grass. Very opportunistic creatures.
Thankfully, after all of this study, I think I finally have them under control. Maybe.
Makes me wonder who is smarter here.
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