The War Against the Ants

First a little background on my beliefs living with the vast amount of Earthlings which are not human. All uninvited creatures in the house get personally escorted out to the best of our ability. This includes spiders, flys, moths (sometimes, even though they are sent from the devil himself.) opossums (yes we did have a baby one in the house, he was a cute guy though), dragonflys, mostly everything with certain exceptions. Mosquitos gotta go, period. I find it interesting the it's only the female that are blood suckers, hmm. The little fruit nat things that come in the warm weather and hang out near and on any fruit or vegges in the kitchen. If they dissapear by themselves when we finally take out the apple rine that was left from yesterday, cool but if they try to make home then it the vinegar with water and a little dish soap the lure them into a irresistable resting place. Then there's ants. We're pretty tolerent of ants espically considerind my upbringing. I grew up battling ants. They would sent millions into the kitchen in the dark for a grain of dry cat food, or a billion would show up in my room if I left a bowl of cereal. My mom would spray Raid and I would ask her why spray that toxic stuff when we breath it in and all it does is drown the ants, so we switched to 409 or Lysol and had to clean up many little bodies. I always felt a little bad but communication wasn't happening. Anyway, many battles with ants later, I've tried to make a certain peace with them. Even if they somehow are crawling on me I try to
Blow them off unless they bite or are near a sensitive area.... Like my ears. Forgot to mention that Mom got some of this Chinese ant chalk which is the best stuff in the world to battle ants. You just draw lines where they are walking or circle what they came for and just leave. 10 minutes later they're gone, like left the building gone. It's the best. We tried to investigate the possible toxisity to us but it seems safe to all but ants and roaches. Anyway all that background to explain that today I had to engage the ants. It wasn't in the house but the garden. There have been more and more mealybugs and all the aphids have ant buddies helping them so we have to do something. I don't know of a natural way to balance the ants. I've never seen any benificial ant eating, garden friendly predator. So I topically deep watered where I see lots of ant activity and they came out in the gazillions! They were carring the larva egg things so I felt twice as bad. After the first battle we'll see if the harvesting of mealybug and aphids by the ants stops. Every creature is just trying to live, wish it didn't have come to this.

-- Posted from the field