That mysterious picture, explained

One day last month Hubs woke me up at 6:30am with the announcement, "We have a little ant problem in the kitchen." Me: "As in, a few ants crawling on the counter?" Hubs: "No, as in, thousands of ants have taken over our kitchen. Well, I have to leave for work now; let me know how it goes!"

Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of the ants in action; my camera battery was dead that day. But let me tell you, thousands of little ants taking over your kitchen is quite a sight.

I knew that killing them without cutting them off at the source would be pointless, so I let them rule the roost a little longer while I turned on the computer and started looking up home remedies. Unfortunately, most of the ideas invoved sprinkling or spraying a substance on a horizontal surface. But MY ants were coming into the kitchen through the wall behind the microwave. Guess what I read online that WORKED: I drew a thick white chalk line on the wall, interrupting their path, and they wouldn't cross it! There were a few daredevils who tried to walk onto the chalk, but they only got a few millimeters before they fell down to the ground. The rest of them didn't even attempt it and returned from whence they came. It was the strangest thing I'd ever seen! Soon, no new ants were coming inside, and all I had to do was kill all the ones already inside - all over the counters, the sink, the stove, the floor, ick. One swipe of a wet rag across my dark green granite countertop (perfect camoflage) would yield at least a hundred ants. But for hours and hours, no new ones came in.

Later they found a new entry point, in the laundry room -- just a few feet down the same exterior wall from their microwave entry point, but it was around that time that I found the spot outside where they were coming into the house, and Hubs dug down and found their lair (hive? colony? stomping grounds?) and erraticated the lot of them; pupae and all. Phew!

You know what was weird about these particular ants? They didn't like sweet stuff, and instead went for the greasy stuff. Case in point: there was, on my counter, a small drop of chocolate syrup that they walked right on past without a second glance. However, there was also a smear of alfredo sauce from the previous night's dinner, and they were all over it. I'm glad it was that way though, otherwise my pantry would've been overrun (cereal and the like) and fortunately only a few made it into my pantry at all. But it was such a nice feeling once the problem was fully dealt with and we knew that for sure they weren't going to come back!