Pain the neck

Ants, ants, ants, ants.  I hate ants.  Not as much as I hate mice, but ants are also on my list of things I really dislike.

Every spring we have lived in this house we are hit with an invasion of ants inside the house.  Some years are worse than others, and this year is the worst by far.  The tiny black ants infested our pantry, and we eventually had to throw out any food that was opened., which was a lot.  Still, the ants had free reign of the shelves, no matter what we did. For about a week I kept the vacuum right by the pantry door, and every time I walked by I would vacuum up any visible ants.  But there were always more and more and more . . .

So on Friday we had the exterminators come out again to spray.  Previously I didn't have them spray the pantry because of the proximity to the food. This time I gritted my teeth and spent hours removing almost everything from the pantry.  Even after throwing out about half of the food in the pantry (anything ants could have accessed), there was a LOT of stuff to pull out. It was piled all over the kitchen, which made actually using the kitchen a challenge.

 When everything was out we could see a trail of ants steadily marching in from a crack in the wall.

 

This time the exterminators had a new theory about why we are perpetually plagued by the tiny black pests. A year after we moved into the house we discovered a slow water leak from the main water line (it was leaking from the shutoff point - located in the pantry).  By the time we found the leak it had damaged the wood floor in the kitchen and hall and the floor and wall in the pantry.  All the visible damage was repaired, but the bug guys think that there is still some rotted wood somewhere in the wall. Apparently ants LOVE rotted wood, so they have set up residence there and sometimes venture through the wall into our home.   Lovely.

So, thus it is. So annoying.  I just had to vent today.