The Invasion

When I first met Billy Proctor he told me that if I was going to make it out here, I needed to be able to laugh at everything.  Right now I have ants falling on my head and it’s a real test of my sense of humor.  At times I cannot even muster a fake chuckle.  At night, ants are being flung across my bedroom when my instinctual panic button has been pushed when I wake to find them crawling on my bare skin. I feel like I’m living in a cult classic horror movie, like Attack of the Killer Ants.  And they do bite!  Billy had one tear a chunk out of him and drew blood.  I only had a shot of formic acid venom spat into me, swelling an already injured tendon-torn finger.

The black carpenter ants arrive every year in swarms.  The winged swarmers are searching for a new colony and shortly after they land their wings fall off and they start marching towards your house, singing “The ants go marching one by one Hurrah, Hurrah…”  I know they’re called carpenter ants because they tunnel beautiful homes in wood, but they actually destroy homes so it’s not like they’ve arrived to help in a way with building projects around here.  I’ve walked into an empty neighbors house and there were 1 foot piles of sawdust and dead ants everywhere. Supposedly they like to live in moist, decaying wood and perhaps her house was rotting, as things do out here on the coast, but when the ants bust into my cabin I can hear them chewing on my cedar ceiling  at night, so I know they don’t mind dry wood.

Carpenter ants don’t actually eat wood, which is comforting, because when the termites arrive it’s another story.  They cause near panic day and night as I watch them swarming around my log home.  Fortunately, carpenter ants are sugar bingers.  They actually farm aphids for their sweet, sugary dew and will feed and protect them.  I can relate to loving sweets and so I have found one common love between us, which is helping me straight up from stomping on them.

The invasion always lasts about 4 days and then nature provides a non-toxic solution, though I think my cabin out here on the point is the last to receive help.

Meet the local pest control…

This is what I had to say at 12:00 am: