Ant Torture Device

When I removed the plastic window seals from my room with the coming of warm weather, I left a residue of sticky tape that I never bothered to clean off. Ant war season started up again, and there's a yearly battle fought on my windowsill. The winners do such a thorough job of clearing away the dead that it rarely bothers me when thousands of insects are swarming for a few square inches of space in my vicinity.

The only place where I cannot tolerate ants is the kitchen, and regardless of how obsessively fastidious we are with making any scrap of food inaccessible, there are always little drops of grease of flecks of crumbs hidden somewhere. The scouts lay down a scent trail that calls other scouts.

The tape residue around my window effectively seals my room from ant invasion; there's a pile of stuck ants wiggling helplessly in one corner, and their comrades sadly march away and deem this area inaccessible. This is a lesson I can learn; I've sealed up the kitchen window gaps with double-sticky tape, and watched as the scouts went into immediate panic at their path being interrupted by a thin, uncrossable barrier.

They're pressing in from either side, and I feel sorry for them, but they are still banned from my kitchen.

09 May 2014 22:47