Heebie Jeebies

If, like me, you are not at all down with the bugs, you may want to skip this post. Wish I could, SHIVER.

We have a bug problem. For the past few years, we’ve had on ongoing infestation of sugar ants. Each spring I’d spray, maybe spray again, put out a few traps, and it seemed to hold them at bay. Them on the outside, us on the inside.

This year, however, they showed up in a few new places in the house, one of which was the kitchen counter (EW EW EW), so we called in an exterminator, and he did some baiting and poisoning, and he sprayed the outside of the house to create a Do Not Enter boundary, and we felt good about the whole thing.

But now…OH. MY. GOD. We’re in the middle of an insect war and even though we haven’t taken sides, I think we are losing. GAH.

Last week, I found a path of ants walking up and down the side of the house – like, hundreds of ants, parading right up to the roofline and back on the brick outside. Why? Turns out we have a wasp nest somewhere in the rafters of the garage, and the ants were going in, storming the nest, grabbing baby wasps, dragging them out and back down the side of the house, and eating them alive.

BARF. ME.

So I got out like, a thousand of those poisonous disk things that the ants are supposed to find, love, and take back to the nest so the Queen can DIE MOTHERFUCKER DIE, and they swarmed them happily. Afterwards I was thinking, hm, maybe I should have let the ants take out all the wasp babies first? But whatever, right?

The disks caused a) the death of hundreds of ants, their bodies lying around in small piles like a monument to the Evil That Men Do, but b) the appearance of thousands, and I mean THOUSANDS, more. The sides of our driveway are like living creatures. Thousands and thousands of ants writhing up and down like a cohesive, sentient being. Brown strips the size of my leg, squirming all over each other, and OH MY GOD, VOMIT.

So we’re living with THAT, and then, yesterday, the ants reappeared in the kitchen, so I put out another poisonous disk.

This morning? We wake up to a few hundred dead ants being eaten by – oh, what’s that now? HUNDREDS OF BABY WASPS.

Somehow, the wasps found their way into the house, found the pile of dead and dying ants, thought to themselves SWEET REVENGE, and got to it.

I may have thrown up a bit in my mouth while typing that.

I took on the ant cleanup, while Sir Monkeypants spent an hour poised over the wasp entrance hole with a screwdriver taking them down one at a time as they attempted to join the party. GAAAAAAHHHHHH.

We have searched and searched for the exact location of the wasp nest and the ant nests, and no dice.

So, somewhere in or around the house we have a) wasps with free access, b) ants with free access, c) bugs that want to eat each other and vice versa, and d) OH MY GOD WE ARE SO MOVING.

Know that phrase, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite?” YEAH. Tooooootally getting great sleep tonight, don’t you think?