Ah! The bane of ants - Part II

As you all know, we've been having some problems with the weird half-black half-red ants here, that don't attack sweet things, but instead love wooden spoons and towels.

I was actually having a good week. Every morning, when I come out, they seemed to be steadily decreasing in numbers. I thought I was doing a pretty good job by crushing them with my fingers. We don't use insecticide, simply because it's the food preparation area. We're getting enough digestion problems from the food here. Wouldn't want to add poisoning to the list.

There was this one day I noticed that there were some ants on the floor near the dustbin. A quick check and I found that there weren't any ants in the dustbin or any trails leading up to the mouth of the bin. "No worries then", I thought. Just crushed the ones that I saw.

So, on a Saturday, I was about to boil some rice for dinner. We just keep the rice in it's original packaging in the bottom shelf of the cupboard. It's of course sealed with those plastic clip thingamajig. Take the bag of rice out and it's flooded with ants. Hundreds of them at least. I don't know if they were trying to make their little nest there or what...

We were dumb founded! Just sat there and looked at it. What do you do? How do you separate out the ants from the rice? You can't sift it, cause the rice is too big and the ants obviously are not stationary. It's late, we're hungry, so we just take out the amount of rice we need and decide to leave the whole bag of rice outside on the balcony.

The next day, we go to the supermarket and buy this chalk thingamajig. I've never seen such a thing before, but my hubby has. He said they used to use it when he was younger and that this was pretty effective. All you need to do is draw a line and the ants cannot cross it. Sounded good. Was also very cheap. So, we buy a pack to try.

We come home and test it out on the many ants running wild on our balcony. It does work. Well, eventually the ant walks across the chalk, but eventually, he dies anyway. So, we decide to sun the rice on plastic sheets, hoping the ants will leave and get killed by the chalk. Upon closer inspection, we realize that the whole bag of rice is damp! Oh crap! Then I remember that it did rain yesterday.

Well, since the rice is already damp, we decide to wash the rice and try to get all the ants drowned. After we did the whole drowning thingy, we decide that we should dry it inside the house since the weather is a little unpredictable. It's actually supposed to be rainy season here but it just rains whenever it wants and not necessarily every day like in KL. So we spread it on plastic sheets as thinly as possible. The only place that have free space in this whole apartment is our bedroom. So we put it there by the window (well, wouldn't call it a window since it doesn't open, but that's a whole other blog topic).

The ants are still there, but they seemed dead. They didn't move. Decided to leave it there for say 30 minutes and come back and check-up on it. Closed the door.

Come back 30 minutes later, the whole room smells of pandan (cause we bought pandan rice). Look at the rice and there are ants ALL OVER!! Those stationary ants were just unconscious. They weren't dead. So, apparently, it's not that easy to drown an ant.

Hubby brings in the chalk and draws lines around the plastic sheets. We can't do anything else. All we wanted to do was prevent the ants from roaming to our cupboards, where they would no doubt have the time of their lives burrowing in our freshly laundered clothes.

At night, when we were preparing to sleep, we decided to move the rice out to the living room and draw lines there as well. Come out in the morning to a beautiful sight! Ant corpses strewn all across the floor. I think most of the ants tried to venture out from the chalk lines at night and as a result suffered what I could only hope was a painful death! =P

Ah...peace from ants for almost two days now. Could this be forever or is there a Part III coming up? I hope it's the former.