“I’ll be a little late this morning. I’m vacuuming ants.” I frowned briefly at the text from my new coworker. Vacuuming ants?
Little did I know I’d soon be vacuuming ants, too.
It began one night, when suddenly Bryan sat bolt upright in bed.
“What is it?” I mumbled sleepily.
“It’s…”
He clicked the light on. “…ants.”
It took a while for my eyes to focus, but then I saw them, too. A trail of ants was making its way along the edge of the bed. Bryan’s arm must have disrupted their train, because several were wandering around, confused.
The text about the vacuum blossomed out of my memory.
We’d recently been transplanted here—from North Carolina to Berkeley, California. This new world was full of strange plants we’d never seen before, perpetual sunny days in the 60s, the scent of jasmine and angel’s trumpet flowers in the evenings, curious staircases that zigzagged up the hills…and also, it was full of ants.
The ants became constant low-level antagonists in our new world. Our emails soon revealed the struggle:
December 22, 2014
Did your weekly meeting go okay? Any more ant invasions?
July 15, 2015
!(*#$(*@!#$* ants!
August 7, 2015
I noticed someone is giving away a queen-size loft bed on NextDoor. The ants would never find us up there!
September 14, 2015
We have tons of ants marching in the bedroom. Haven’t figured out what they’re trying to find. Maybe we can do a joint investigation tonight.
February 1, 2016
Since we hadn’t had ants for a long time, I untaped the hole in the sink while cleaning yesterday, but the ants came out of it overnight.
Ants invading a bag of potting soil
We soon learned the ants’ favorite foods. Contrary to everything I’d known about ants, these ants weren’t interested in the sugar jar or the fruit we’d leave out on the table. But if we had eggshells in the compost bin, the bin would soon be full of ants seeking the slimy egg remains.
At the first winter rains, the ants arrived in force. They squeezed through the cracks around our windows, the drain holes in our bathroom sink, and seemingly anywhere that wasn’t airtight.
One day I bought a tube of caulk. I felt like Uncle Vernon from Harry Potter, smiling as he prepared to board up the mail slot so no more letters could arrive for Harry. I inspected the crevices around the bathroom molding, envisioning a neat line of caulk sealing them from ants forever.
But after caulking a tiny corner, I had a more acute problem. This was my first foray into caulking, and I’d absently gotten it all over my hands. Despite persistent scrubbing, it still felt like my hands had been dipped in plaster.
Plus one for the ants.
Self-conscious of my unpresentable hands, I wore gloves to the grocery store that evening. On the walk to the store, I wondered whether wearing gloves to the office the next morning would be considered unprofessional.
Serendipitously, my manager texted to suggest we work from home.
It turned out our potted plants were just the environment the ants craved—plentiful dirt in a dry, sheltered apartment. Water a plant and hundreds—thousands?—of ants would materialize from its depths. Many would be carrying ant eggs from their underground tunnels as they sought a new dark space to infest. Check out the video and let us know in the comments how many ants you think there are!
The ants came out of our potted plants by the hundreds after watering
These ants didn’t bite, sting, or get into our fresh food. They just turned up, consistently, in massive numbers. It reminded me of the Civilization series of computer games I’d played with my brother and dad as a child. In the game, you didn’t actually need to take over enemy cities by force. Eventually you could just absorb them with your influence. That was the ants’ strategy for sure. They were just going to overwhelm us with sheer numbers.
For a while I felt sorry for the ants. Maybe we could coexist. But then I began vacuuming the ants, too. We tried Borax, and then Borax-based ant baits. The ant baits kind of worked, for a short while. If you’re living in Berkeley, they’re the only hope.
The trouble with these ants is that they have multiple queens. Normally the strategy with ant baits is for the scout ants to carry the poison back to the queen. Then, unable to reproduce, the colony collapses when she dies.
But not so with the Berkeley ants. These ants have many queens, so they continually regenerate, like trolls in mythology that regrow from a single limb. If ever there was an invincible insect, this is it. Just know before you go.
I wouldn’t say the ants are the reason we left Berkeley, but we certainly weren’t going to take them to Portland with us. The day we left, we removed the soil from all our houseplants and drove them bare-rooted to Oregon.
It wasn’t long after we’d moved into our new place when we saw a couple of ants.
“Oh no,” said Bryan in trepidation. “Could that be—?”
I eyed them critically. “No,” I said. “These ants smell different.”
Never did I imagine we’d learn so much about ants, but when you live long enough with anything, you get to know it very well.
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