Anty

The other day, walking with a bucket full of vegetable and fruit scraps, past the ancient plum tree, down to the compost bin, I noticed one of the main branches of the tree, almost eight inches thick  looked a bit rotten.

It was so rotten that it might easily be broken off, so with an unladylike grunt from me and a resounding, boomph, the bottom half of the branch, three feet long, crashed at my feet.  What I saw next horrified me.

Ants…on the branch that fell off, and scurrying like mad things, many of them carrying eggs, and millions upon millions more on the part of the branch that had remained attached to the plum tree. A hundred thousand million seething like ocean waves over every exposed part of the branch and now running for the higher reaches of the tree, while the ones on the ground poured from their broken home.  Some had begun to run away into the grass.  Better put a stop to this I thought, and ran inside for the insect spray.

I was in enough of a hurry that I didn’t even remove my mucky gumboots as I ran inside.  Back at the tree I sprayed, and sprayed and sprayed.  After a while, most of the ants began to look quite ill and so with a final spray, I went back to the house feeling lucky to have spotted, and then routed the invasion of the plum tree.

Two weeks later, I went to the garden shed for potting mix. There’d been a trail of ants about four wide, for most of the late summer and autumn but they weren’t bothering me and I wasn’t in the shed very often, so I’d just allowed them to be busy in the shed, not realising what that might mean. Live and let live, I thought.  This day as I reached down to get some soil out of the bag, I noticed the outside of the bag had quite a few ants on it.  When I opened it up,  the bag was roiling with them…so much so that my scooping pot was visible only by its shape and the soil itself wasn’t visible at all.  I tossed the bag out of the shed, shot back into the house for the spray, gumboots  and all, then emptied a can of spray into the bag. Then I had a good look in the shed.  Horror of horrors, the dry woodpile was also alive with ants. I sprayed it vigorously, perhaps even a tad over-zealously.

A lot of ants got away but eventually the majority had been exterminated.  There shouldn’t have been two massive invasions of ants within a couple of weeks so I called the local Council who told me to call the Northland Regional Council(NRC), who asked me to bring in a sample.  Back in the shed I scooped some of the ants up. Now a few hours later, many still wriggled.

Next day the NRC called to say that they had identified them as Argentine ants.   The ants had since discovered in my studio indoors, that between the bottom of the bird cage and the removable tray is a dark, dry and nesty place, and  I’d had to save the birdies from them five times in one week.

Last week in the shower I spotted three ants on the bathroom wall so I went puck, puck, puck, with my forefinger, and squashed them, then let the water dribble my hands clean.  Then there were two more. Puck, puck. Then another three, puck puck puck.  This is no good I think and run off, dripping, to get the fly spray.  They were coming from behind the shower lining so I sprayed into the cracks and then hopped back into the shower.  Within five minutes, they began to pour out from behind the lining, falling over each others’ poisoned bodies and dropping onto the floor, the bath ledge, the taps, my nail brush.  They ran like tiny demons along the shower rail and clambered up the shower curtain.  They fell on my fresh dry towel and onto the bath mat.  Sons of unwed mothers!

That afternoon I cleaned them up, a full dustpan, but noticed a few quite lively ones walking about on the wall. Puck, puck puck.  But then there were more so I sprayed again, this time in the bottom of the shower lining.  Within a few minutes they poured out, dying on the ground, on the skirting board, everywhere.

It turns out that Northland is now plagued with these accidentally imported ants and that there is only one effective eradicant called Xtinguish.  The ants take Xtinguish back to their multi-queened colonies where it exterminates  the entire colony.  Enough to bait a quarter of an acre costs $50.

The problem with spraying I found out too late, is that the ants dissipate and start a whole new clutch of colonies. It takes only eight ants to begin a new colony. In effect, spraying multiplies their numbers and extends their area of invasion.  NRC recommends getting together with your neighbours and doing a whole area with Xtinguish at once.