what brought those crumbs and mustard to that plate
then steered the tiny ants to their fate
what but design of heebie to enthrall
if design govern in a thing at all
They're wandering over your desk one at a time, constantly, but they're so small you don't notice. When there's food, the scout finds it and goes back to the source to tell the rest, and then you notice when there are lots.
The ants live in the ceiling, and drop down on your desk when they see food?
The ants live in your sandwich? That's why you didn't have any on your plate, you ate those.
Your desk is made of ants?
Your custodian is ants?
The ants are all in your head?
5: but last month I did notice them, one at a time. They're pretty easy to see on the desk.
Your custodian is ants?
Frank Herbert wrote about that scenario
The ants are all in your head?
And Phillip K. Dick was all over this scenario, but substituted aphids.
(I like the link in the latter, which assures us that no aphids were harmed in the making of the movie.)
Does your school have an entomology department? Would someone there be willing to come explain your tiny ants to you?
The entomologists are lazy, not the ants.
They've never asked me for $25, at least.
We've got tiny ants also. Just in the bathroom (where there is NO food, obviously) and in my writing corner, where there is seldom food (coffee and sometimes oranges).
Maybe they aren't ants. Maybe they are tiny spy drones.
where there is NO food, obviously
Why is that obvious? Is everybody else better at cleaning up the crumbs from the shower croissant than I am?
Maybe everyone has tiny ants and heebie's are just bigger than usual because Texas, and therefore visible.
Is everybody else better at cleaning up the crumbs from the shower croissant than I am?
We mash them down through the drain with our feet. #dansavage
I have always called the tiny ants "sugar ants" but that may just be a childhood artifact untethered to any existing taxonomy.
I may have mentioned this before, but one summer I agreed to check in on the apartment of some friends who were away. It was on the second floor and I noticed a steady stream of ants going up the (outdoor) stairs. I got to the door and I saw the trail ran right under the door into my friends' apartment.
I figured maybe one of them had killed the other before leaving and the corpse ants were at work. It turned out they had left a basket of apples on the kitchen counter.
The ants hadn't found the corpse yet.
I cannot recommend highly enough Empire of the Ants by Bernard Werber. A kind of pulpy SF novel written from an ant's perspective. Apparently half the book is a dumb story about humans but I have zero recollection of any of that. Ants, ants, ants. Awesome. And you can read it in half an afternoon.
where there is NO food, obviously
Having played SimAnt, I can tell you there is enough ant food everywhere to support a whole nest.
all under the plate. (But not on the plate, with the crumbs).
Maybe they were planning to carry the whole plate back to the nest.
1 is probably right. They're living in the computer or the copier or something.
I mean, 5 makes the most sense. But I guess I have to allow 9 as disproving it.
I remember living in the deep south and there would be these big cauldrons of ants living in the ground. My neighbor would dump a big pot of boiling water on them.
If all you have is boiling water, every problem looks like a cauldron.
IF ALL YOU ARE IS LAZY EVERY PROBLEM LOOKS LIKE A WAND.
If all you have is the German army, every problem looks like a kessel.
If you don't have the German army and you try fascism, you wind up working for the Russians instead of beating them.
If all you have is a bankrupt hotel franchise, every problem looks like a money-laundering opportunity.
Last night one of my cats vomited on the kitchen window sill. This morning? Cat vomit swarming with ants.
I'm about ready to seek professional help.
Last night one of my cats vomited on the kitchen window sill. This morning? Cat vomit swarming with ants.
I'm about ready to seek professional help.
If you do have the German army and you try fascism, one third of you winds up working for the Russians and rest of you winds up being really good at soccer.
If you have a cat that knows enough to vomit somewhere away from carpet, you should just call it a win.
Cats can lift 5,000 times their own body weight, so you need to be careful.
The cat seems to be doing a pretty good job of vomiting without help.
I have always called the tiny ants "sugar ants" but that may just be a childhood artifact untethered to any existing taxonomy.
That's what the custodian called them, too.
I didn't even know ants could have custodians.
If you weren't so easily bored, I'd suggest this: wait for the ants to clear, then one day set out some food and watch until an ant arrives. Follow it as it goes to tell the colony. Bug spray the shit out of the hole he uses, then seal it. Done. Until they find another hole. Repeat.
No. You set ant poison at the hole, which the ants collect and carry back to their nest, where it will be eaten by, and poison, not just the ants but also their wife and children. If you're going to chemwar, chemwar like you mean it.
I had some of those tiny ants in my place in Fez. They got into my honey. It was really good honey. I ate those ants.
If they had been locusts, you would have returned with a higher calling.
I've had ants in the kitchen a couple of winters, and find that "Terro Liquid Ant Baits" seems to work pretty well. Works as Mossy describes.
Shoulda said that the key is boric acid, and from what I read online, you can make your own "ant bait" with borax (or boric acid) and confectioner's sugar. I tried that, and it .... (ahem) didn't work. Hardly any ants came and took the bait. Not sure why. But these ant baits did the trick, and how.
Yes. We tried it too, when I was a kid. You need the kind from the store.
Even the boric acid traps from the store don't work here, at least on the dominant ants, the Argentine ants that are part of the inter-continental trans-oceanic 10,000 square mile global Argentine ant supercolony and don't truly have a single "queen" to kill. You gotta bring in the professionals. Also (according to my ant guy) the Argentine guys aren't even particularly attracted to food, they come in largely because they like the climate in human houses, so you can be as clean as possible and it does no good. I think I chronicled my ant struggles here before, nothing works except men with chemical sprayers on their backs.
Like I said. Ants do not call for half-measures. Motherfuckers are organized.
You might think it would be cool to have members of "by far most populous known animal society" in your house but I assure you it is not.
There's a vicious war happening on American soil between two supercolonies of Argentine ants, billions of casualties every day. One of the few examples I know about of fatal intraspecies warfare outside primates.
Travel to where the other army lives, bring back a queen, install in a nearby park. Maybe several queens.
Looking at ant papers now, I see this:
Wax on, wax off: nest soil facilitates indirect transfer of recognition cues between ant nestmates.
Authors are Danish.
Of all the creatures which share our homes, ants are the ones least known to humans. At least in the Biblical sense.
"where it will be eaten by, and poison, not just the ants but also their wife and children."
Sisters, nieces and nephews, given that ants are eusocial.
Easy way to remember is simply to keep muttering "most ants are aunts, most ants are aunts".
wait no that's wrong, or at least not always right.
I was trying to figure out a joke along the lines of "on my way to St. Andrews, I met an ant with a hundred thousand sisters, nieces, and nephews" and so I googled the original to doublecheck the phrasing and found our own m/tch m/lls answering questions here!
OT: Apparently, all the sex in Canada was taken up by "Chad" and all the sex for Armenians by the Kardashians.
64: Have I ever told the story about being an editorial intern at a science fiction magazine in the late eighties, responsible for packaging up slush-pile submissions and sending them back in their SSAEs? We had a nutcase who submitted several stories a week and would get cross if he didn't get a timely rejection letter for each individually.
I once opened a letter of complaint from him, noting that while we had rejected his submission of "The Ant's Aunts", and also his story "The Aunt's Ants", he had received no response whatsoever to his equally valuable work, "ANTS! ANTS!"
to put 63 more briefly: ants aren't gentlemen.
68 is funny. In my dialect it doesn't work. But I can read it the way it's intended.
68 I'm sure they were pretty bad but I would have been very tempted to read some of those stories.
So, in AZ, the Republicans came out of the mail vote with only a six point lead. I think that's a good sign.
Of course, they already called it for the Republican.
They're living in the computer or the copier or something.
ANSI encoding strikes again.
They're living in the computer or the copier or something
You're thinking of bugs.
ANSI encoding strikes again.
You're thinking of spiders.